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Remember Google Drive? If you have a Gmail account (I do!) you’d notice every time you login there’s an option at the top of your page to select Google Drive. Now they’ve decided during Google I/O that started on Wednesday May 15th 2013, their pow-wow of all that’s great about Google to upps the ante on Dropbox and increased the Free Storage from 5GB to 15GB.

Google Drive is Google’s clone of Dropbox that launched on Tuesday April 24th 2012 as reported by Kelroy in Google Drive launches – Another major player joins the Cloud Storage Wars.  Now why they are doing this (you can take your jaw and tongue off the ground please, it’s not becoming of you dear reader!) remains a bit of a mystery.

Maybe they have extra storage space after they’d killed off a bunch of old services and decided to give users an extra 10GB. Possibly they may be using the uploading patterns of Googlers to sell advertising space to third-party websites on File Hosting services.

Or maybe 15GB is the total space allocated to all Google Services and Google realized that most of it is unused. Hence they’ve decided to let the users have to do with it what they will, thereby justifying the expense of giving Google users that much Server Space in the first place.

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Whatever the reason, this is a real treat for Googlers as the rival Dropbox which eerily enough works the same exact way, only offers 2GB, leaving you to pay to get more storage space.

Setting up Google Drive’s a no brainer. You just download the Google Drive web installer and it installs a protected Folder on your computer that connected to the Cloud, just like Dropbox. You can then sync items with your Cloud Locker, just like Dropbox.

Conclusion: It’s a Dropbox clone, now with Bigger free storage. I can’t say “better”, however, as like Gmail, Google Drive’s prone to crashing with a recent outage stranding many Googlers for a few hours on Friday May 10 2013.

So what can you do with a Google Drive you cannot do with Dropbox? Actually nothing really as both services can be used to:

  • Email large attachments

  • Email to upload a file from computer to your Cloud Drive

  • Uploading download links from the web straight to your Cloud Drive

  • Start Remote downloading of Torrents straight to your Cloud Drive

  • Dropbox or Google Drive Folder as default Document Sync Folder

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Still it’s worth a shot as I’ve already signed up and I’m uploading my videos and files for sharing and hosting on a website. It’s still at 5GB; apparently the extra 10GB kicks in when you’ve maxed out your storage space.

To be honest, despite my expressed misgivings about Google Chrome stability as expressed in the article How to reset the default Search Engine in Mozilla Firefox, I really use a lot of Google’s other products, especially Cloud Services in a bid to to increase my Cloud Backup Storage.

This bump in storage space is sure to be a boon to website hosting peeps looking for a way to host a full-blown or basic HTML website as described in Kemory article How to publish a simple HTML website using Google Drive. Especially to college student, who can now sign up for Google Drive and Dropbox and ditch buying a Thumb drive from their to-do shopping list this coming Fall.

I’ll let you know over the next few days how my Test Drive of Google Drive works out as I think outside of the DropBox. First great practical and usable product to come out of Google I/O!

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