Google happenings

Mike November 28th, 2007 Features, Technology

In case you didn’t notice, your Google Mail storage space was increased to 5 gigabytes this past month, which just means you can probably stop deleting mail and never run out of room. Don’t forget that in early January, we’ll all have around 6 gigs of Gmail diskspace. If you don’t use Gmail yet, you should read more about it and think about a switch. I just got my in-laws hooked up on it last week and they love it already.

Next comes even bigger news that I for some reason completely missed in the last year.

It’s called Gdrive, or Google Drive, or the code name Platypus, and it’s going to be their first venture into providing online file storage for their users.

Yes, users already kind of store things with Google now in terms of email, photos, etc. But this is going to encompass everything, where you can essentially backup anything important on your computer and store it on Gdrive for free.

You will be able to access it from anywhere you are, as long as you have a web browser and know your password. Files will have the ability to be shared with your friends, much like Google Docs does now I suspect.

Online storage is nothing new, I even started using Mozy back in August to backup data from my computer. That kind of ended when I switched to Ubuntu because Mozy had no client available for Linux machines.

I’m not sure anyone knows yet exactly how this will work. I’ve seen the mention of a Gdrive Client, but don’t know as of yet whether it’s something you have to install locally or can use through their site. Since it’s supposed to be accessible from anywhere and any computer, I wouldn’t think you’d need a special downloaded application.

Which will be exactly what I need since Mozy has failed me.

This is pretty big news for all of us. As time passes and online applications become important, I realize more and more that I want to get away from depending on my laptop to get things done. I wrote many moons ago about Moving to the Web (you can see the series located in that link) and I am still in the process of doing that.

This will add another way to put your “stuff” online where you can get to it from anywhere.

One interesting thing I did read about Gdrive is a poll on Mashable asking if you would store your data with Google. Some people are worried that Google holds A LOT of information on us. Right now, they have my email, documents and financial information because of being with Adsense.

Once they have all our important files we want to backup, the will have virtually everything.

Is anyone worried about that? Will you store your stuff online with Gdrive when it comes out?

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