Google Drive Cloud Storage: 10 Things You Should Know About It Wednesday Apr 25th 2012 by Don Reisinger

Google Drive Cloud Storage: 10
Things You Should Know About It
Wednesday Apr 25th 2012 by Don Reisinger

NEWS ANALYSIS: After a long development
program, Google Drive has finally been
released to general availability. But what
should customers know about the platform
before they start using it?
It might have taken awhile, but finally, Google
Drive has launched. Google has been talking
about its intention to introduce a cloud storage
service for at least six years. And rumors about
the imminent release of a storage solution to
take on companies like Box and Dropbox
started percolating vigorously in the past few
weeks.
On April 24, Google finally confirmed that it
was, in fact, working on a storage offering and
perhaps even better, it was making it available
to customers in the coming weeks.
Now that the curtain has been pulled back,
however, Google must begin the process of
informing the world about why they might want
to use Google Drive. Sure, it's a cloud-storage
offering that works on just about any platform,
but there's much more to it than that. But
before any consumer or even enterprise user
jumps onto the Google Drive bandwagon, they'll
need to know more about the solution.

To help out, we've decided to take a look at
some of the finer points of Google Drive to help
inform would-be users about why they might
or might not want to sign up for the service
when it launches in the coming weeks.

Check it out:
1. It's not unique
Let's just get the simple truth out of the way
first: Google Drive is in no way unique. There
are a host of cloud-based storage solutions
across the Web, including Dropbox, Box and
Amazon's cloud services, that perform the
same function. But Google is Google. And that
alone makes this offering somewhat special.

2. 5GB of free storage
One of the nicest things about Google Drive is
that it provides ample storage for what
customers need. From video to music to
documents, users can save up to 5GB of
content at no charge . Considering how many
users will likely sign up for Google Drive, that's
an awfully large amount of storage Google is
willing to provide at no charge.

3. Google has integrated into its existing
solutions
As one might expect, Google has integrated
Drive into nearly all of its prominent
applications. Gmail users can send bulky
attachments through Drive; Google Docs users
will be able to collaborate on documents from
within the platform; and Google+ users will find
their videos and pictures in Drive instantly
available on the social network. Google is big on
integration, and it has proved it again with
Drive.

4. Third-party apps play a crucial role
Google isn't establishing a walled garden with
Drive. Instead, the company says that a host of
third-party application providers will support
the service, allowing users to store and share
content across multiple platforms. That's
important. In the online world having the ability
to transfer data from one service to another is
increasingly appealing to users. It's a welcome
move by Google and its partners.

5. Windows, Mac and Android out of the box
The nice thing about being Google is that it
doesn't necessarily have to only play nice with
one platform the way Apple and Microsoft do.
So, the company said on April 24 that it will
enable Drive to support Windows, Mac and
Android devices out of the box.

6. iOS support is coming soon
Did you notice anything missing from that
previous mention of Google Drive support ?
According to Google, iOS support will not be
available to Drive users out of the box.
However, the company has said that it will be
"coming soon." Whatever that means is up for
debate.

7. File support should come in handy
There's nothing worse than receiving an
attachment to an email, only to find that it
comes with a file extension that your computer
doesn't support. To address that problem in
Google Drive, the search company says that it
has built in native file support for more than 30
different application file formats, so users will
still be able to open, say, Photoshop or
Illustrator files even if they don't have the
application running on their computers.

8. Go back to the past
As anyone who has spent time backing up data
knows, being able to go back in time to a
previous upload is vastly important. According
to Google, Drive will allow users to go back as
far as 30 days to see what updates were
made. The company also says that users can
save a specific revision forever, if it's really
important.

9. There is a cost involved
All this talk of free storage and features forgets
one important piece that customers won't want
to miss: Google Drive is a paid service for
power users. Those who want 25GB of storage,
for example, will need to pay $2.49 per month.
A total of 100GB of storage will set customers
back $4.99 per month. According to Google, it'll
charge $49.99 per month for 1TB of storage.

10. Search plays a key role
Given Google's history, it would only make
sense that search is built into Drive. The
company says that users will be able to search
based on keywords, file types, owners and
other attributes. Even better, users will be able
to search with image-recognition technology
and by objects contained in scanned
documents. The platform's search sounds quite
powerful.