Google Drive Goes Live – Tech Thursday

After months and months of waiting, Google has finally launched their new Cloud storage product "Google Drive". This comes after Amazon and Apple, have already had a cloud storage product, Dropbox and Box.com have very robust and popular cloud storage services. How does Google's stack up?

It does the basic document storage and works with Google Docs, and also supports video, audio pictures and the like. It works on Mac and PC as well as Android devices. iOS devices will be getting an app in the near future. So the convince of the new Google Drive is pretty good.

The thing that really got me, was the Optical Character Recognition, which would allow you to scan a document on your computer, and upload that scan to Google Drive, with Google able to search and index it for you. Not a bad feature at all. Take all your documents you want to save and have backed up, scan them, then upload them.

You start with 5GB of storage which seems to be the standard for most services now, but you can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, or 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

I have no clue what I would do with 1TB of storage, but I'm sure I could find a ton of stuff, but would still not even come close to that limit. Thankfully, the standard 5GB is more than enough for a lot of what I would like to have stored. But the applications really are there. I was very skeptical of cloud based products at first, but so far, many of the offerings have shown that they are working hard to offer something that is useful. As for the privacy aspect of it, that is still a concern with me. But the odd word document is fine. In the meantime, I'll be giving it a go, backing up my Doctor Who fan fiction about Karren Gillan.

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