Tech Friday: A test drive of Google Drive
Posted By RichC on April 27, 2012
Against my TOS reservations, I installed the PC version of Google Drive on my notebook computer. So far from what I can see – for storage — it’s not all that different from Sugarsync that I used for a couple years and my regularly used Dropbox installation (still preferred at this time). I had thought that the poorly marketed Skydrive by Microsoft could eventually dominate, but the sleeping giant continues to sit on it’s hands and let others delve into the cloud storage space. Personally I think both Microsoft … and Amazon, with their stellar S3 storage … could still easily take the lead in cloud storage and personal file backup space.
One of the glaring negatives that I noticed on week one of the Google Drive release is that they don’t’ support iOS devices on the initial release (the iPad for me). Dropbox is pretty OS neutral at this point and I suspect that their lead will keep their service the preferred 3rd party cloud storage … although pricing is pretty attractive with Google Drive – $4.99/mo. for 100GB.
One of the differences is that Google doing more than just storage. They are iintegrating what used to be called Google Docs into their Drive storage. 
This makes it a bit different than the “file storage only” companies and brings a app cloud computing platform to users. Since I do use this web-based computing platform to sharing documents, spreadsheets and work collaboratively on projects, it does interest me … but it really isn’t ready for the productive business world. I have found that apps work fine for clubs and organizations, or for personal and perhaps school papers where several people can work together and see real-time updates to their work. I use this regularly with my son who is in college and more recently to help review his internship applications, resume and cover letters.
So far I’ve backed up my Google Docs to my computer for offline access and stored a few photos and documents. More in a few days after using it …
Comments