Google is the name of an American company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page . Although its most popular product is a search engine, the company provides a large number of computer services.
One of the tools that Google offers to Internet users is Google Drive . This service, launched in 2012 , allows you to store files on the Internet , with a free option and several plans that require payment. Google Drive emerged as a replacement for Google Docs , a tool with similar characteristics.
Google Drive users can save photos, videos, drawings, text files, and many other types of documents. The free version of the service offers a capacity of up to 15 gigabytes : those who want to store more files must purchase a more advanced plan. There are alternatives from $1.99 per month (100 GB of space) to $299.99 per month (30 TB of capacity).
It should be noted that Google Drive is a cloud computing service : users can access their files from any computer, tablet or smartphone by entering their identification and password. This means that access to information is not limited to a specific device.
Google Drive , on the other hand, makes it easy to share files among many people. The account holder can invite other users to view, download and/or edit documents, without the need to send the files via email or other means.
Suppose the guitarist of a rock band records a tune and stores the audio file in Google Drive . Then he can authorize his colleagues (the bassist, the drummer and the singer) to download that file so that they can also work with his composition.
Before the first cloud storage option appeared, many users took advantage of the feature of attaching files while composing an email message in addition to the ability to save a “draft” or even send a message to themselves to achieve similar results, although with different restrictions. For example: to have a backup copy of a document in the "cloud", we could attach it to an email message and leave it as a draft or send it to the same address or another one of ours.
One of the limitations was the maximum weight allowed for each attachment, as well as the total, which was usually around a few megabytes. If we didn't have to upload very heavy things, with this old trick we could even organize our messages in folders to make them easier to search. It was a precarious and limited system, but for a few years it served to give us the possibility of accessing our files from any computer with an Internet connection. Google Drive, needless to say, changed everything.
Since Google has created its own ecosystem , something that Microsoft has also done with its respective programs and services, whenever we are within one of its applications we can communicate with the others "easily." For example, if we receive an email message with a file attached to our Gmail box, we have several possibilities: review it online with one of the several viewers that are automatically offered to us (whether it is an image, a text document or a video, for example), download it to our device or even save it to our Google Drive.
Since the attached files are also located on Google servers, transferring them to Drive is a process that we perceive as instantaneous, because the time it takes does not depend on the speed of our connection but on the power of its facilities.