Why not? It is practical, available everywhere, well debugged and understood, and very efficient. It works much better than ftp and scp protocols.http should be used for web, not for all whatever file transferts.
Honestly, I don't use Google Drive (or DropBox or similar services) very much. But I do use them for small and big files (sometimes just a few lines of text, to securely transfer them to other people, sometimes for multiple GB as a backup mechanism). As far as I can tell, its performance is purely limited by the bandwidth of my connection, so performance is "trivial", as good as it can be.yeah, but what about cloud google drive, do you use a tiny file to make it work properly?
First, you don't have to use a web browser to use cloud in general, cloud storage in particular, and Google Drive/Dropbox as specific examples. You can do it with wget, curl, and http(s) libraries from your favorite programming language (I'm particularly fond of doing it in Python, but tastes on that vary).Web browser, and resource and memory wasting.
Second, you are likely running a web browser on the platform anyway, to read the news, find out what the weather is, and chat on the FreeBSD forum. Asking that web browser to do one more thing (upload and download a file) is very efficient, because it is already being run and in memory. No need to fire up a whole separate process groups, with shells, context switches, shared libraries, and all that gunk.
I've yet to run a browser that is not free.SCP is far more efficient and free.
And scp is really not efficient at all. Look at the protocol, look at the number of packets that are required, look at how security and dependability are implemented, look at the CPU footprint. It is a bad design, being a hybrid of the very outdated rcp protocol with ssh stuff tacked on. And finally look at the fact that modern production implementations of networks and TCP stacks are optimized for the most common protocol, which is http(s), which is one of the reasons it just runs better than most other protocols.
Im not saying that scp is bad and should never be used. There are good use cases for it, for example involving strong crypto. But making it the default for all file transfer cases is insane.