There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Google’s newest offering. Termed Google Drive, it’s laden with quite a few big expectations- not the least of which is the belief that it might well help Google breathe some new life into its currently ailing, somewhat lackluster Chromebooks. But just what is drive? And what can you use it for?
To make a long story short, it’s basically cloud storage turned up to 11. I’ll explain.
As expected, you can store pretty much every kind of file you can think of online, and access it anywhere, any time- as long as you have access to the Internet. What’s more, Google boasts, it seamlessly integrates with the rest of your Google experience, meaning you can easily share a picture from Google Drive on Google. New users start with 5 GB of available storage for free, and can pay monthly stipends to increase that storage to 25, 100, or even 1 TB of space- the prices aren’t actually all that bad at lower tiers, truthfully- though it starts to get a touch pricey once you pass the 1 TB mark. It’ll be able to do more than just store files, however- and that has group storage organizations like Dropbox very, very worried.
See, in addition to the seamless integration with apps like Gmail and Google Docs, Drive is designed to help users collaborate and share files and content. It looks very, very similar to Google Docs- not a bad thing- and functions in a fairly similar fashion.
What’s more, according to Google, they’re currently working with a number of third party developers to help set up Drive to do everything from website mockups to sending faxes. In other words…if you’re a Google user, you’re soon going to have a whole new suite of cloud productivity applications right at your fingertips. Not too shabby at all.
For the time being, you’ve now got five gigs of free storage to use as you see fit. Go on, give it a try.
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Honestly for the few times I use cloud storage I don’t see myself going through the process of switching. However for the power users out there I can see how some of these features may be useful. Dropbox still has dedicated apps for the mobile platforms as well as actual apps on the desktop that allow use of Dropbox as if it was running off of your computer which is honestly pretty nifty and awesome when you want to get things done fast!
Maybe I’m paranoid but I’m not sure I trust Google to maintain my files without poking through for any information they could sell to marketers or government agencies. Then again, ;the few files that I have on Dropbox and Boxnet are carefully chosen to protect my personal info so I used a similar protocol to choose what’s safe for cloud storage and use, I suppose it doesn’t matter where it is.