You didn't miss World Cloud Backup Day. It just kinda happened

Google and Box have each revealed new cloud backup products.

Google's even got two: the one we'll see soonest, on June 28th, is “Backup and Sync from Google”. The product is a formal merger between Google Drive and Google Photos, which makes sense because at present an Android user will likely be using Google Photos almost without conscious thought, but it's not well-integrated with Google Drive. The Alphabet sub therefore plans to give us One Cloud Synched Folder To Rule Them All.

If you're a Google G Suite user, the company wants you to ignore the new product because it's also testing “Drive File Stream”, another share 'n' synch offering that will take all your stuff into the cloud but only download it to new devices when you go looking for a file. Google's made Drive File Stream available to its Early Adopter Program members.

Box's new offering is also called “Drive” and also does the “stream files from the cloud when you need them rather than filling your disk in advance” trick.

It's not hard to see why Google and Box like the idea of streaming – plenty of people have lots of stuff in their cloud lockers, so it costs cloud operators every time it's downloaded. It also consumes devices' storage and individuals' or organisations' internet connections. Doing cloud storage this way should therefore make such services more comfortable to use ... until the day you forget to sync a file for auto-download and can't get online! ®