Ending months of speculation about Google launching an online drive, the Google Drive was unveiled last week.
"Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard rumours about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually exists," Sundar Pichai, senior vice-president, Chrome & Apps, posted on an official Google blog recently.
For starters, users will get 5GB of storage free to back up anything - photos, videos, music, documents, PDFs. Possibly, as Wired put it, Google plans to replace the pendrive with Drive.
Google supports the Drive on both PC and Mac as well as on Android devices, and an app for the iOS is promised. Those who use Google Docs will feel at home using the Drive, which has Docs built in.
The blog post goes on to say that Drive supports keyword searching and has OCR software built in. How does that help?
"Let's say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up," Pichai says.
Google says the Drive uses same infrastructure as other Google Apps services, promising "security and reliability".
It also has centralised management tools for administrators, encryption on emails exchanged between Drive and the desktop and replication of data "so that in the unlikely event that one data centre is unavailable, your files will still be safe and accessible" Google says, guaranteeing a 99.9 per cent uptime and 24/ 7 support.
Incidentally, the Drive has an Indian connect.
Turns out that all the centralised tools we talked about in the last paragraph were "conceptualised and built" by Google's engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Maybe one more reason for the patriotic ones to use Drive. A Wired article online raised a couple of interesting points. One, if one already used cloud services, did one need yet another service? The answer, as Wired put it, is that Drive is for all those who already love using Google services.
Another interesting point Wired raised was if Drive was a harbinger of things to come - meaning an online OS. "Will Google Drive integrated with Chrome OS usher in the next generation of cloud-based personal computing?" Wired asked.
"With Chromebooks, [Google Drive] is even more powerful," says Pichai, "because it just starts working naturally. Your local drive is also Google Drive".
Basically, Drive can then work as the local file system and say a document one saves on a Chromebook is saved directly on the cloud. Gartner has already said the personal cloud will replace the personal computer by 2014. Is this a step in that direction?
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