We have long been awaiting the roll out of Google Drive, Google’s cloud-based file sharing and storage service, and details have been leaked today on all that Google Drive will entail.
It has been expected that Google Drive would be announced sometime this week, the same week we’ve had updates from its competitors SkyDrive and Dropbox. Today, Google accidentally posted the details of Drive on its French blog and then deleted the post, but not before Google + user Gerwin Sturm made a copy and ran it through Google Translate (funny how its own tools–G+ and Translate–were used to spring Google’s leak.)
Update: Google just unveiled Drive on its blog.
The details, then, would seem legitimate, being that they’re directly from Google’s blog and came from Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President, Google Chrome & Apps.
Here are the main features of Google Drive:
- They call it the next step in the evolution of Google Docs, meaning of course that it will be deeply integrated with Docs, a service with which many Gmail customers are familiar
- You can download and access all of your documents, videos, photos, Docs, PDFs–in short, files–all from within Drive
- Each user gets 5GB of free storage, with the option to upgrade to 20GB for $4 per month
- The file viewer will handle more than 30 types of documents, directly from the web browser, including HD video, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop–even without the software installed on your computer
- Data replication will occur in multiple server sites, so in the case that one set of servers goes down, your information is still retrievable–though it does promise 99% uptime
- For cloud-based project management, administrators can set up accounts, allowing people to collaborate in the cloud. Admins will have ability to add or delete accounts, as well as to upgrade storage space for individual users
- Drive is designed to work with all devices, even if they’re not Google products. It works on Mac, PC, Android. An iOS version of the app will be available in coming weeks.
- Powerful Search – Search by keyword or filter by document type, owner, activity, etc. You can even search via the content of each document, as Google has applied in-text OCR search technology. For example, if you scan an article and download it into drive, you can search using one of the words quoted in the article. You can even use text to search for images. If you have a photo of the Eiffel tower, type Eiffel Tower and it will find it.
