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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."
Don't forget SkyDrive. Even MS, who knows Windows inside and out, install a special client and just sync files back and forth like everyone else does.
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"
It's free, and it's Google. I would trust Google to be around for a while, to charge decent prices and provide useful tools to access the drive, and also I believe them when they say no human will see my stuff. Some other companies, such as Facebook, I don't trust nearly as much, because they seem to lack Google's commitment to be a trustworthy arbitrator of data.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Wouldn't you encrypt your files before uploading them? I would.
Google as ever uses reverse IP lookup rather than browser preferences to set the language (language preferences only work once you log in and often even not when logged in). They assume people do not travel and everyone within a particular geographical area will only speak the dominant language.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
you only have 5GB of porn? damn, guess im perverted one :-P
Dropbox has one, Google Drive doesn't. That's a killer for me.
Infuriate left and right
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you. I have thousands of files in mine (I work for Google and have been using it for a few months, with a very generous storage limit, so I've got lots in there), and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time. What makes it really nice is that it indexes everything -- it can parse virtually any file format, and even uses the Google Goggles technology to extract textual descriptions of objects in images, and I think it also does OCR on images as well.
Of course, if you're more worried about Google extracting information from your files than about your ability to find them, then this aggressive search indexing is stronger motivation to encrypt. If you just want to be able to find your stuff easily, from anywhere, it rocks, and encrypting will break it.
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