Google Drive isn’t really just about storage,it’s about moving everyone’s work to the cloud.
Finally the much awaited 'Google Drive' was unveiled, ending months of speculation about Google launching an online drive.
"Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard rumours about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually exists," Sundar Pichai, senior vice-president, Chrome & Apps, posted on an official Google blog recently.
For starters,user will get 5GB of storage for free.Further Google Drives can be upgraded to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When upgrading to a paid account, Gmail account storage of the user will also expand to 25GB.
Google supports the Drive on both PC and Mac as well as on Android devices(Android 2.1 or higher), and an app for the iOS is promised, and Google Docs is built right into Google Drive so that the user can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
By default, all your Google Docs–Documents, Spreadsheets, Forms, Drawings, Presentations, and Fusion Tables–will sync to your Google Drive folder, unless you disable this preference. Any files and directories you place on your local Google Drive will also automatically sync with your cloud-based Google Drive. Again, you can choose not to let them all sync over.
Using the Web interface, Google Drive’s online interface defaults to showing you all your files in alphabetical order.
In addition, Google includes a unique feature. You can upload PDFs and scanned documents and it will try to translate them via optical character recognition (OCR) into Google Docs,supports keyword searching and has OCR(Optical Character Recognition) software built in.
But how does OCR help?
Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up.
It also has centralised management tools for administrators, encryption on emails exchanged between Drive and the desktop and replication of data "so that in the unlikely event that one data centre is unavailable, your files will still be safe and accessible" Google says, guaranteeing a 99.9 per cent uptime and 24/ 7 support.
Incidentally, the Drive has an Indian connect.'Google Drive' is built by Google's engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
