ARTICLE:GOOGLE DRIVE

“Google Drive”-Virtual Hard Drive

Google Drive is one of the best Cloud-Based Online Storage Services of Google.  Google drive is simply a rebranding and expansion of the existing Google Docs. On April 25, Google launched “Google Drive” in order to compete with existing players like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Sugarsyncs, among others. The idea behind Drive is to consolidate Google Documents, along with the ability to store other file types as well like music, videos and also any other file. If you have a Gmail account, you are eligible for Google Drive.

Key Features of Google Drive:

             Google Docs are also stored in Google Drive. So we can store or upload all manner of file formats in Google Drive, Drive gives you the option to convert files into Google-friendly formats as well. Share individual files or whole folders with individual people, your entire team or even customers, vendors and partners. Create and reply to comments on files to get feedback or add ideas also. Drive maintains a revision history of edited files, allowing users to view previous versions as far back as 30 days.

Google Drive is available for PC, Mac, Chrome OS and also Mobile Devices which is having Android. Google Drive comes with a desktop application for Windows and Mac. To create a new folder called ‘Drive’ which shows you all the files you have up in the cloud-based. Google has now added support up to 30 types of files, directly in your web browser.

           

Google Drive combined with an incremental sync-based backup service. So whether you have files stored on your PC,

your Mac or your Android device ,your data gets backed up, and you have completely transparent access to everything that has been backed up from those devices to the cloud from any authorized device that you need to access it from. And the data should be fully searchable, whether it is from within an application or the Chrome browser.

User should be able to choose what folders or applications on your computer or mobile device get synced. Even better, it should be able to integrate with existing applications, such as Microsoft Office, so that when certain types of data gets saved to your local hard disk, such as productivity office formats (.DOC, .XLS, .PPT, .ODF, .PDF, etc.) it automatically gets replicated to your Google Drive.

Another new feature in Google Drive is OCR text scanning. What this means is if there’s any text in an image you upload, Google will scan the image for text and make it searchable making it easier to find images even if you haven’t tagged them correctly.

Perhaps, the biggest strength of Google Drive is its tight-knit integration with other Google services. Very soon, we’ll be able to save attachments from Gmail directly to Google Drive or attach documents and files directly from Drive and e-mail them.

Very soon, we’ll be able to do all this while on the move through the Android application. iOS users will have to wait a bit longer for an application. With Drive, you get a separate 5GB of storage space which is separate from the space you get for e-mail. Speaking of which, Google has now increased Gmail storage space from 7.5GB to 10GB. In case user need additional space in your Drive account, then that can be bought for a reasonable sum of $2.49/month for 25GB, $4.99/month for 100GB and $9.99/month for 200GB.

Limitations of Google Drive:

Robb Henshaw, Director of Communications at SugarSync, explains, “One reason we believe the average user will have trouble with Google Drive is that it requires users to convert their files into the Google Docs format if they want to work on their files.”

Users can upload and store other file formats like Microsoft Word *.docx documents, or Microsoft Excel *.xlsx spreadsheets, or PDF files. If opened locally from the Google Drive folder on a Windows or Mac OS X computer, those files will open in their native applications. However, if accessed from the Google Drive website, the files are opened as read-only in an online viewer. In order to edit a file from the Web, the file has to be exported to or saved as in equivalent Google Docs file format. That process results in having two of the same file in Google Drive--the original, and also the Google Docs version. You can tweak, edit, and otherwise modify the Google Docs version from the Web, and those changes will be saved to Google Drive in the cloud, and synced back to the Google Drive folder on the local system. This introduces two potential issues, though.

First, the file that is synced to the local drive that has the most recent updates and edits will be in Google Docs format. Google Docs files in Google Drive are actually links that open Google Docs for editing online. If you happen to be offline, those links in the Google Drive folder would be useless.

There are a couple of ways to work around this issue. First, you can configure your Google Docs for offline access, and you can use Google Chrome browser extensions to enable you to edit Google Docs files offline. Another solution would be to save the file back to its original format after editing it online so that it will open locally in its native application as mentioned above.

That brings us to the other potential issue--file fidelity. Google has gone to great lengths to maintain formatting when converting from Microsoft Office formats to Google Docs and back again, but it still leaves a lot to be desired

            Google Drive is the latest free Tool, available for both individual users and Google Applications Admin.