Google’s services has taken yet another leap forward. Launching today, Drive is Google’s new Cloud service, offering up to 5GB of free space to every user and an option to Upgrade their Drives if users want to. Now you can store all your files in Google Drive and access them from anywhere using your account. And your data also remains safe. So you don’t need to worry about losing your precious data. Google Drive is currently available for PC, Mac and Android. Google Drive for iPhone and iPad is also coming soon.
We have seen Cloud services offering free storage in the past. What makes Google Drive different is it integration with other Google services. Google Drive not only lets you store files, but you can also view, edit and share your files with friends, using any supported device. Here are some of Google Drive’s exclusive features:
- Collaborative Work: With Google Drive, users can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. and work together on the same document together. Users are also able to see live changes made to the files as and when they are made.
- Send large files: Now you don’t need to attach big files with your emails. You can send/share files from your Google Drive and recipients will be able to access the same version of the file.
- Social Integration: The photos and videos you store in Google Drive are directly available on your Google Plus account. All it takes is one click to share them within your circles.
- File Search: You can search through your files by file type, owner and more. Google can even recognize texts using OCR from images and return search results having text matches from images too.
- Open files right on your browser: Supports more than 30 file types including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator without any required installation.
- Use with other Apps: Open, edit, share your files on Google from a number of Apps, directly in Google Drive.
- Control your files: You can share your files with specific people, give them editing or viewing privileges to files the way you want.
- Feedback: Get comments and feedback on your files and make your work more collaborative.
- Revisions: Google tracks each change made in a particular file and a user can revert back changes made to a file up to 30 days back. So you never have to worry about accidental saved changes.
In order to celebrate the launch of Google Drive, Google has increased free GMail storage from 7.5GB to 10GB (and counting). Yes, you heard it right. GMail offers 10GB free space to its users from now on. The increase will take effect over the next 24 hours. Also, free users get an additional 1GB of space for Picasa, Google’s online photo storage.
Upgrades are available extending Drive (along with Picasa) to 25GB, 100GB, and even up to 16TB of Drive Space. Upgrading an account gives you a bonus of extending your GMail storage to 25GB. Though all the plans are not yet available, you can sign up for a personal Google Drive below. Also, Google Drive is not yet available for Google Apps domains.
Google’s new Cloud Drive has got a lot of features that makes it stand out against other cloud storage services. With built in features for viewing, editing, sharing files, advanced file search and more, Google Drive certainly has a considerable edge over other Cloud services like DropBox and Box.net.