Google Drive. The Google cloud service

Well, kind of..

I have just started a Google Drive account and this allows me to sync files between my laptop, Android phone and other computers such as the one I work on. I have a free 5GB drive out there in the "cloud" and I can store anything I like (so far I have some articles and mp3 files). I could also share documents with others, say if I was writing an article but I wanted someone else to chip in and collaborate, and they could do so in real time..

Though, some files would eat up 5GB quite easily, so if you have some video files, perhaps uploading them onto YouTube might be a way around this (and setting them to private if they are not for sharing).

Unlike the Apple iCloud service, Google offer this to people who do not own a device from Google. You can have a PC and your browser could be Firefox but you could still use their service..

I think, due to that.. Google might have the edge over Apple with their cloud service.

Got mine already

Will always grab some free disk space if it's up for grabs

I've had the 25GB Skydrive for donkey's years but it's always been useless as it was so hard to put stuff up on it and so hard to delete stuff as well, like deleting a folder was really hard for example.

Anyway with Google's move Microsoft have reduced the free space on Skydrive to 7GB and brought in a fee structure for larger sizes but they have also merged some of the Live Mesh technology into Skydrive at the same time so the user interface is a llittle more usable.

Sadly Microsoft had two really useful technologies about 4 or 5 years ago that they have gradually ruined, livesync was one which was brilliant for my employers as a way to sync software updates across our customer base, lots of fine grained control over what got synch'd and with whom, it also did not require physical cloud storage, was completely free, pretty fast and very reliable and worked even behind a firewall, RIP LiveSync, Microsoft simply pulled the plug on the service with only 6 months notice. (it relied on cloud based servers for part of the comms magic and they simply switched them off).

Live Mesh which had also been around for a while and provided remote access to a PC behind a firewall as well as 5GB of free cloud storage and a full and mature range of sync features, was first dumbed down to remove most of the really useful features and has now been cannibalised to provide some of the basics for Skydrive, however to simplify it for the masses all the really useful stuff is being removed, now we cannot specify what folders we want to sync and it would appear that Live Mesh will soon be Resting in Peace too, so the wonderful remote access feature that allowed me to help family members abroad without them having to be bright enough to even click on a button, what's going to happen to that? Well looks like it's RIP too.

I like having free disk space but having one big mapped 25GB chunk of space mapped from my PC to the cloud does not really do it for me, I would be much happier if these services would simply appear as a new drive letter that I could manage through Windows Explorer, let me create some folders and copy stuff to them, I don't care about the syncing I would much prefer if they just gave me a disk in the cloud that I they assured me was being correctly and securely being backed up and I would be happy

I've not installed the local Google app yet but I will try that tomorrow I think.