I have had a keen interest in the online storage space for sometime.

It all started in 2003 when I had a hard drive go bad and spent 24 hours frantically copying my personal files to CD. That only happens once to anybody. I now backup things across my home network using SmartBackup for the PCs and Synk for the Macs. What I wanted to do was send the files off site, but that was cost prohibitive.

Then in the fall of 2004 Robert Cringely wrote an article called “´Cause Backing-up is Hard to Do” that caught my attention. Cringely suggested that a peer-to-peer backup solution would solve the cost issue. That got me to thinking. It would indeed solve the cost issue, but create a privacy issue that in my mind is way too big a leap for must Internet users to make.

I was not only thinking, but I was also trying services on the market and calculating how much it would cost to deliver a solid service. It turned out that most of the services that I tried were lacking in terms of user experience and the cost to deliver the service was rapidly falling. It felt a little bit like the Internet access market of 1994.

Just as Internet access changed things forever, people taking advantage of the availability of broadband Internet access and the falling price of data storage to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format will profoundly change the way we live our lives over the next five years. As people embrace this digital lifestyle a strong need to securely store, access, share and publish these digital files is emerging. This is going to be big. Fred Wilson, whose opinion I respect a good deal, agrees with this point of view.

Evidently so does Google. There is a big GDrive brouhaha going on today. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has a fascinating summary. Aaron of box.net and Nik from OmniDrive have good points of view.

Mine is a simple question. Would you trust Google with your most personal data?

I have asked that question a lot. The answer is always no.

And I am not buying the story that your average consumer is too dumb to know. Consumers are smart. You are one of them.