Google Drive Advantages and Disadvantages
Google Drive was offering 5GB of free online, synchronized storage, no strings attached, with competitive upgrade prices if you need more, from 25GB on up to 1TB.
Is it worth a look? Like most freebies from companies as ubiquitous as Google, I think so. After all, the only way to determine whether it’s right for your particular setup is to give it a spin.
Ok, I am writing this post to discuss the advantages and the disadvantages of Google Drive, Well, here it goes…
Reasonable Free Storage: The wonderful thing about Google Drive cloud storage for the moment is that it’s truly free, no hidden gotchas (well, yet anyway). Google Drive offers 5GB free storage, no privacy tradeoffs like crawling your data or bothersome inline ads to worry about.
Integration with Google’s online products: Google naturally offers better integration with Google’s online products. However, never forger that, Dropbox’s simplicity of file sharing remains superior to Google Drive’s, offering better-integrated tools to quickly make files or folders accessible to other users (without requiring service memberships or logins), but if you and your friends, family or work collaborators already live in the Googlesphere, you owe it to yourself to give Google Drive a shake. Also you can sign in to DropBox with this link to give a try.
Google Drive Replaces Google Docs: Activate Google Drive and Google Docs is no more, at least as a standalone destination: Click on your old shortcut and you’ll be rerouted to drive.google.com, where your ‘Documents’ folder now exists as a subset of ‘My Drive’. Crafting a new spreadsheet or presentation now occurs by clicking a ‘Create’ button, and you can access shortcuts to your Google Docs directly from your Google Drive — launch one and you’re automatically routed to its Google Docs interface through your default browser. If Google Docs is your office suite mainstay, then Google Drive is a no-brainer.
One word search: Google even claims to be able to match unnamed photos with search terms, though it’s apparently limited to easily recognized objects. Upload documents, videos, PDFs, photos and more to your Google Drive and when you search on words like “Tuesday” or “urgent,” the service searches within each file for matches. What’s more, it uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to make legible text in even scanned documents searchable (Google uses the example of an old newspaper article).
Reasonably quick: There’s no such thing as a “fast” cloud drive at this point, but Google Drive synchronizes offline files as fast as anything else, sometimes faster: In my tests, a 12MB image file took about two minutes to synchronize with Google Drive, where the same image took over three minutes using other such. But the difference is not much, however when uploading large file you will feel it.
Platform Agnostic: Google Drive works on Windows and Mac devices as well as Android ones out of the box, with a promised iOS client for iPhones and iPads in the offing (if you use one of the latter, you’ll have to wait a bit longer).
Google provides native apps for each device, making synchronization as simple as downloading the client, then dragging and dropping files to a mount point. The service’s only downside, if indeed this counts as one, is that it won’t sync existing folders outside the Google Drive share (on the other hand, the upside of having a single share point — though not unique to Google Drive — is that it encourages first-time users to organize their volatile data within a single location, making that data subsequently easier to find and maintain).
After saying all these advantages, you need to give more caution of the terms and conditions of Google on Google Drive..
Did anyone read the terms of service??? It says:
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."
In other words you lose your intellectual property when you upload something there.
But, One of the executives at Google explicitly said the policy means people's files are still owned by them. They need that clause to provide the search and indexing service.
As in the same terms of service you can see:
"The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."Nevertheless you are agreeing to "give up" your information to them.
Imagine you're writing a book and you store it there... they may use and modify your text to make advertising. Or use any private photo of you in any advertisement. They may even use a modified photo of you.
The use of private information to make advertisements is not cool to me and you don't get a dime if your information is used.
The final words……… I wont be using Google drive for storing my personal files, however, I like its service over all.
