Google Drive/Docs Summary
What is Google Drive?
Google Drive is your personal stash of files and folders that follows you wherever you go - it lets you keep everything and share anything. With Google Drive, you can access files, folders, and Google documents (such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides) from a web browser or any device where you've installed your Google Drive.
What can be done with Google Drive?
As free and decent cloud storage and service, Google Drive enables you to create, share and keep all your stuff in one place. With Google Drive, you can now access your files, even the big ones, from wherever you are. Share them with whomever you want, and edit them together in real time.
Create, Share and collaborate
Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work together in real time on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other documents. You can share your stuff with others, add and reply to comments and even make edits on the go.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere
You can access your stuff from anywhere—in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all your devices. Install Drive on your Mac or PC, download the mobile app to your phone or tablet, or visit anytime at http://drive.google.com.
Search everything
Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Google Drive can even recognize content in your scanned documents and images.
How much cloud storage?
You get started with 15 GB free cloud storage space. Learn more at http://drive.google.com.
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Drive and Google Docs Final Conclusion
Google Drive - Advantages
Google Drive - Disadvantages
Google Drive - Bottom Line
Google Drive - Advantages
- Google Drive is best in class for collaborative office suites. It includes fast and reliable
local file-syncing and offline access to documents, empowered with built-in OCR
technology. - Generous 15GB of free cloud storage space is fairly enough for our basic cloud storage needs, if we use Google file formats for most docs.
- Additionally, Drive can open over 30 kinds of files right inside our browser.
- Thanks to HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, significant feature expansion of Google Drive and Google Docs is
available by using Google Chrome, the native Google browser and its Chrome Web Store apps. - Google Drive is decently supported on Windows and Mac, as major desktop platforms, and iOS and
Android, as most utilized mobile platforms.
Google Drive - Disadvantages
- As Google Drive users, we may feel uneasy about privacy. Even though, Google claims
that we indefinitely retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that we hold in our content, the toughest criticism of Google Drive is still over privacy and IP ownership. - Although, it's quite easy to manage the privacy settings of our profiles, if we're not careful during the
utilization of new collaboration features, it could potentially expose our image/face to unknown people. - All videos and image files that are stored via Google Drive must be downloaded each time they're accessed, which may be time consuming, and count against our bandwidth cap.
- IMHO, in-text documents and file/folder encryption should be implemented on Google Drive. As a potential solution to encryption issues, some third party free services can make Gmail, Google Drive, and Google search more private, e.g. the free BoxCryptor program that adds an encrypted folder to Google Drive.
- So far, Google Drive does not officially support Linux editions, though some unofficial solutions are available.
Google Drive - Bottom Line
- Google Drive, as part web office suite and part cloud storage and file-syncing service, decently retains and constantly improves all the best features and core functionality of its predecessor, Google Docs, while quite decently supports document creation, sharing and collaboration, on major desktop, and most utilized mobile
platforms. - In order to avoid potential privacy issues, the sharing and privacy settings in our profiles should be managed
responsibly. - All in all, Google Drive and Google Docs is a decent cloud storage and cloud service package that offers lots of productivity features and 15GB of cloud storage, for free.
- Additionally, Google significantly expands Google Drive/Docs functionality in Google Chrome, through the variety of Chrome Web Store apps.