Google Drive To Drop-Box?

Google finally launched the much awaited cloud storage service: Google Drive. A place whee you can store your files, access them anywhere, share them with friends or colleagues and also work on the files simultaneously. Simply put, upload and access all files in the Drive.
Google Drive comes with a free space of  5GB which can be extended to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month and even 1TB for $49.99/month. Also as a gift for a premium account as you upgrade your Gmail account storage also gets expanded to 25GB.

[Image Credit: Official Google blog here...]


People familiar with the other cloud based service(and a competitor now for Drive) Dropbox would be familiar of how work with these kind of things. Like Dropbox, Drive also creates a folder on your Mac or PC. Then its just the way you normally do with your folders, pick and drop files in to it and the items in the folder gets sync'ed to the cloud storage on its own. Now share them or use them from any other system or, if you are and Android user, from your Android device using the Google Drive Android app. Bad news for you if you are currently a BB, iPhone or Windows user who wishes to use the cloud with this Google service, as the app is currently not available for these devices.

Where is my Google Docs?
We are not sure why Google chose to do it this way, but once you add Google Drive to your account, Docs automatically disappears. Or rather is replaced by Drive. And don't expect that surprise or confusion to go away just yet, Drive does some rearrangement of some of your stuff!

But Great Search Capabilities and Integration
So while there is some confusion and disappointment on smartphone users part (although this one was initially expected with Android being a Google' lap), there is some real nice work done as well.
Google Goggles image search is included in there for you to use it just the way you are used to with this service. So for example you put an Eiffel tower photo on the Drive folder and then do a search from any other of your sync'ed devices and you will see how good the integration is of Goggles with Drive. But yes, with Google already saying that the Goggles is in early stages, don't expect it to work if try to find any images that you took on your last holiday with your girl friend. It should get better over time, is what Google has to say!
If you are familiar with Dropbox, you should know that syncing files and folders on multiple devices means each device will have to download the sync'ed files and folders and once you update them, they will be sync'ed to your cloud storage. Google preferred it a bit different here with Drive, as many of us expected anyway. The files are not downloaded to your devices, rather what you see in your Drive are the links to your files and folders and once clicked they open in the browser. Nothing different from what we are used to in Docs.

Early days yet and don't worry if you are not able to kick start your Drive yet. It's rolling off steadily and should soon reach you. In the meantime its good to know that for those of you for whom Drive is already there, you should also have the Google plus integration as well. That is to say you can now share images on Google plus from your Drive folder as well. And should we know the search giant any better, Gmail integration will be on its way soon!!

If you are a lover of cloud based services, or love creating a sync of your files/docs over multiple devices that you may use, try giving Drive a try, and since this is Google's service you never know when in the near future you see Drive items figuring in the Google' search :-p

Thanks to all our readers for the support and yes, since it was the other in demand topic, watch out for "way to exclude unwanted image from Android gallery" as that will be our next topic for a post. Till then Happy Crunching !!!

Milind Shrivastava

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One of our regular readers and the one who suggested this topic first, Milind is a software engineer by profession and is himself a blogger. You may follow his life events on his blog All in a day
Connect with him either on Facebook or on ApnaCircle for his professional life.