Google Drive: Advantages and disadvantages

Google drive not only lets you store your data securely but activities like sharing, editing etc has also been made easy. This service liberates user from the use of a variety of software so as to open different file formats. Drive supports about 20 different file formats, so various file formats could be opened directly into the browser without installing the related application program.

Drive services comes in two versions:

• Free: which gives up to 5GB data storage
• Premium: This gives from 25GB to 16TB online data storage on monthly rental.

• Live changes: Users can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. and can edit the same over internet. This provides a real-time working experience on the document, as if editing the document in local machine. It also saves the changes made on the document at the same time.
• Anytime accessibility: Files and documents stored in the data centers of Google can be accessed by a user while sitting in any part of the world, by simply logging into their Google drive account. Corporations have gained enterprise mobility due to this reason.
• Device independency: There is no specific platform defined for using the file uploaded on Google’s drive. Any device, which is connected to network, can be used to access the file stored on drive.
• Integration: Documents stored on Google drive can easily be opened in any other Google app. This provides a better integration of this service with other cloud applications, so as to provide hassle-free experience to the user.
• Ease of Searching: Documents can easily be searched for, using Google Drive service. Text can also be searched, even from images using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It’s an intelligent way of searching for the text even in the image files.
• Limitless file size sharing: Sharing has been made easy among a specified group of people as special editing permissions can be given to them. Moreover, the storage limit has also been increased from a few MBs to a few GBs. Users can share any size of the file without any limit to any specific file size.

With a number of advantages, certain security and privacy issues have also been highlighted in Google drive service. Some of them are listed below:

• Google holds the authority to index your data, stored on Google drive. So in case, some keyword matches with any title of you photograph, some text in you document etc. could float in the search result.
• Internet based service means full dependency on internet to access the data. As data is stored remotely so some connection is required to access the data. In case of a scenario where the Internet isn’t functioning, access to your data in such situation becomes impossible.

Google Drive provides an easy solution for online back-up of data to the users. In emergency situations like hard drive crash or data corruption, Google drive provides great help to the users because of the availability of all time data back-up for the users.