Class 12: What is Google Drive?

Google Drive is Google's response to the popular trend of companies offering cloud based storage to their users. Apple has the popular "iCloud", Microsoft has Microsoft Cloud and OneDrive, and Google's version of all of this is called "Google Drive". Google Drive has a bunch of features that can all come in handy in business environments as well as academic or simply for personal use. All someone needs to do to have their own Google Drive is create a free Gmail (Google E-mail) account and one will be set up and waiting for you with 5 free gigabytes of cloud storage to use any way you'd like.

A wonderful feature of Google Drive is its simple and easy to use connection and compatibility with all of Google's other apps. For example, above I've put a picture of one of my Google Drives (This is the one I use for all my school work which is linked to my Boston College gmail account), as we can see, most of the files I have here on my home page are Google Docs files (Google's word processor app) and a few Google Slides files (Googles presentation app, much like Microsoft PowerPoint). From my Google Drive I can see all of these files, and open them, along with the program that runs them with one simple click.

On the left side of the screen when Google Drive is open, there are a few options to click, one being "Shared With Me". By clicking this, a new screen will open that has only files that were shared with you by other people, thus making Google Drive a very versatile and easy to use collaboration tool as well as personal tool. Here in my Shared With Me section we can see multiple Google Docs that Prof. Walsh has shared with me for this class, which make them easy for me to find and keep track of. There is also a Google Slide that was shared with me by a fellow student where we had to do a group presentation as our final, this of course made it much easier for our group to add/edit the presentation and all be on the same page when it came time to present.

A few other useful features of Google Drive include the "starred" folder. By clicking the star on any of your Google files, they will immediately be put in this folder to make them easy to find and access. There is also a "recent" folder, which of course makes it easy to find something you may have just been working on the day before rather than search through all of your files to find it. And lastly, down in the bottom left corner on the Google Drive homepage, it will tell you how much of your cloud storage you have used, which serves as a constant reminder so that you don't wind up running out at an inconvenient time. What happens when you finally run out? You may be wondering and the answer is simple; Google will then offer you additional storage space for a fee much smaller than the cost of the average flash drive, and exponentially less than the cost of an average external hard drive to plug into the computer (without any of the hassle of transporting it).