Having more usb sticks than I can count I still my find myself in the awkward position of never having essential documents with me when I need them. This may be because of my lack of organisation or the need to regularly re-format the usb sticks for other uses either way I need something better.
I briefly tried Dropbox but wasn’t overly keen and I’ve yet to try Microsoft’s SkyDrive though that may change with Windows 8, I use iCloud for my iPhone contacts etc…. but not documents.
That’s where Google Drive comes in, the new cloud storage service from Google, having been a fan of many of there other services I figured I’ll give it a go. So I went to sign up, unfortunately I was told it wasn’t available to me and I could register my interest which I did, expecting to have to wait anywhere up to a few months, I was pleasantly surprised the next day when the e-mail arrived telling me I could now start to use it.
Installation was nice and easy, a download of less than 1mb and a few minutes later I was ready to go, initial impressions are good;
- The installation pops a short cut on your desktop for quick access which is perfect as I intend to use it as a replacement for “My Documents”.
- It would appear and I stress that I haven’t tested this yet as I need to clear out my Documents folder that you can re-point “My Documents” to the Google Drive location which is a nice touch, see this website here for instructions on how to change your “My Documents” location.
- All my Google Doc’s were automatically sync’d which was nice, although as a rare user Google Doc’s most were out of date and I’ve started afresh.
- You can manually choose which folders to sync which will be useful for avoiding large files that would bust your data limit (5gb).
I will be interested to see how it pans out when using across several computers, but it will be nice to access my documents across all the different machines I use without trying multiple usb sticks.
