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Google Drive Goes Live
lemmen writes "As widely expected, Google Drive has launched officially today. Google Drive is free for the first 5GB, while you can get an upgrade to 25GB for $2.50 a month. They say the service is available for PCs, Macs, Android devices, and soon iOS devices. According to Mercury News, '... the success of Drive will ride largely on whether Google can differentiate its offering from already established fast-growing cloud storage startups that were in the market first, such as Dropbox and Box, as well as Microsoft's SkyDrive service and big consumer media competitors like Apple's iCloud and Amazon's Cloud Drive. ... Existing Google Docs files, the centerpiece of Google's existing cloud storage offering, will move to the Google Drive service once users download apps and install the new service."
Versions count against your storage, trash counts against your storage, Google Docs files do not, shared files do not.
No right-click menu in the desktop client, so no grabbing public links etc.
No ability to name the Google Drive folder, only choose its location (the same as dropbox, but a lot of people were hoping for "pick any folder anywhere").
Speed is a bit faster.
Storage prices a lot cheaper ($9.99/month for 200GB vs $9.99 for 50GB on Dropbox).
There is offline access to Google Docs stuff, not tried that yet.
The Windows client is very very very similar to an old Dropbox version - even down to "Selective Sync" within the Google Drive folder.
Android and iOS apps - no Blackberry app yet.
All in all, I haven't come to a conclusion yet - better in some aspects, worse in others. I think a lot of people were expecting a lot more from Google Drive than this offering.
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
Wouldn't you encrypt your files before uploading them? I would.