The concept of offering users online hosting that they can use to hold their personal files and data is nothing new. In fact, it has been almost completely milked out in the past couple of years.

This week freshened things up a bit. We’ve seen some spirit being put back into this area by  a few vendors that are reshaping the meaning of cloud storage once again, or the very least make it more noteworthy.

First up is Google Drive, the personal cloud service the search giant has been working on for half a decade or so. The concept is to make things simpler than what the user would get with other offerings, although it’s too early to gauge the market reaction so soon after launch. What SiliconANGLE’s Alex Williams did determine, however, is that the announcement wasn’t exactly attention-grabbing to say the least, especially considering pretty much every single competing service whose name we’ve become familiar with had a product update recently.

Dropbox announced a new sharing mechanism just a day before Drive was unveiled. Users can now share their documents and media with one another by simply providing a link, which in turn raised an interesting discussion about the potential for abuse a la Megaupload 2.0.

Alongside this buzz were a few other updates this week, such as Symform’s funding round. The company already raised $8 million and is looking for another 3, in hopes of further fleshing out the remote storage for local storage model it has developed for its own service.

Last but not least is Hewlett-Packard and its updated VS3 private cloud configuration. The 6,000 VM VirtualSystem deployment is now integrated with Microsoft software as well some fancy new hardware.