Google Drive is a cloud storage service owned by Google Inc. Google Drive allows user to edit documents (including Spreadsheets and Presentations), share, synchronize and store in the cloud. It is free to use Google Drive and all you need is a Google/Gmail Account. Introduced in the year 2012, Google Drive presently have a total of 240 million+ monthly users.
Technical aspects of Google Drive
- Google Offers initial 15GB of online storage for free that is used by Gmail, Google+ photos and Google Drive in combination.
- Post utilization of 15GB of online storage you can buy monthly subscription by paying a little amount and you can own a maximum of 30 TB space per account. However there is no limitation for the number of accounts you can own.
- Google Driver Viewer has support for viewing the file types for most of the formats.
- There are a number of Third-party apps that lets you access Google Drive. One such extension for Google Chrome will let you access Google Drive even when offline.
- Document Limit for Google Dock – A document must not exceed 1,024,000 characters regardless of font, page and size and should not exceed 50 MB.
- A spreadsheet must not be larger than 20 MB and a Presentation slide should be within 100 MB.
Why Prefer Google Drive over Traditional Storage
You need Google Drive because you need to have access to your documents, pictures, Spreadsheets, Presentation and other files all the time when required. You do not need to carry a physical hard Drive / USB flash Drive to carry files and hence there is no risk of losing your files.
No risk of virus infection or attack by a hacker, as your files are safe in the Google Cloud with strong password. Edit and View files on Desktop, Laptop, Latest Mobile Phones and Tablets, etc… anytime, anyplace, any platform and whatever.
To Sync files between Google Drive and local machine, you need a Google Drive Client. There are a lots of Google Drive client for Systems like Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS but unfortunately there is no any official client software for Linux.
There are a few open source third party tools that lets you mount Google Drive on you Linux System, but here we’re introducing yet another popular tool called google-drive-ocamlfuse, which allows you to mount your Google Drive under your Linux filesystem to access your files more easily.
