Like many people, the other week I downloaded and installed Google Drive. This is the long-awaited competitor to services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, offering free online storage with the ability to upgrade to higher capacity at a cost. Dropbox and the various other lookalikes have been around for some time, so is Google coming to this market too late and is the party already over?
The concept of Cloud Storage is pretty simple. Services like Dropbox allow you to share a local folder on your PC or Mac and have that data replicated into “the cloud”. From there it can be accessed by other devices, including smartphones, web browsers and tablets. The great benefit of cloud storage offerings is that they allow all copies of data to be kept in sync, while retaining a backup copy that can be used if any or all of the local device copies are lost or corrupted.