In short, Google drive is Google’s cloud storage platform. You might have heard the words “cloud storage” before and been confused but these are just marketing buzz words. Cloud storage simply means that instead of your files being stored on your home computer, they are stored in a remote location on one of Google’s computers or servers. There is nothing new here really if you’ve had an email account with Google or any third party (hotmail etc), your emails are already stored outside of your home computer. This is why you can access your emails from anywhere.
In the diagram we have three devices in different locations all able to access the same files because they are stored on the Google server.
Having your files stored externally has many benefits.
- You can access your files from any computer / smartphone / Tablet
- You can recover your files easily (if your computer is stolen or gets broken)
- You can free up space on your home computer (every Google account comes with 15GB cloud storage but you can add more if you need it for a small fee)
Google drive sounds great, but how do I use it?
To start with Google drive is part of Google’s apps so you are going to need a Google account. To sign up for a Google account go to www.google.ie and look in the right hand corner. Click Sign in.
Once you’ve clicked sign in you will be taken to a sign in page, below this it will say create an account
You can then fill out the form to create an account. Once you have this done you will have access to Google services. Go back to Google homepage and click on the small grid of black squares.
this will open Google’s app panel and you can click on the Google drive icon.
Once inside Google drive there are a number of things you can do.
If your internet browser is Google chrome you can upload whole folders of files otherwise you will have to upload on a file by file basis. Documents created inside of Google drive will auto-save which is a very handy feature if your doing a CV, college work etc as you will never lose work again. You can also export the file to Microsoft word for some more intense editing if needed.
This should get you started with Google drive. In the next Blog post I will cover sharing files from your drive and also how to attach files from your drive to an email and send.