Google Drive released: 5G free cloud storage

Google Drive was launched this week, giving users 5 GB of free storage to sync across computers, and finally giving Google a viable competitor to Dropbox, Microsoft's SkyDrive, Apple's iCloud, and the like.

The press release said:

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With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. 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. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

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you can sign up right now at https://drive.google.com/start

So there's been a bit of a stink over this in the news, because of Google's terms & conditions which were recently updated across all its services.

The issue at hand is the terms that state that users....

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give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

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The New York Times has already told its employees that the Google Drive & even Gmail should not be used for any company purposes until Google elaborated on how its policies apply to sensitive corporate information, as have many other companies.

Other cloud services (Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud, and Dropbox) have similar terms, but it seems that Google Drive has sparked these concerns because of Google's ability to apply its search technology. When asked if it intends to integrate Drive content into search results, Google replied with a canny, “We have nothing to announce at this time.”

So beware, if you are using ANY Google service, you may inadvertently be sharing your sensitive / secret information and who knows....that info may actually end up in the most popular search engine in the world's search results too!!!

I'm thinking of picking one of those to host my US market IOS and Android Apps on, since my web host is in Europe, and sometimes there is lag over the Atlantic.

Kind of like when you fly from the US to Europe or vv, there is always turbulence over Greenland and iceland, that interrupts your long overdue nap.

skydrive is giving 7gb , u could always setup a NAS at home and then u have ur cloud storage when your out of the house and then use a backup service for your NAS for security if say your house gets blowup by a jet fighter crashing into it ;)

Microsoft has given me 25Gb free on Skydrive as an existing (free) customer. They upped it when Google announced its new service.

I haven't tried the application but I've found it won't accept encrypted files via web upload. I get the message that uploading folders isn't allowed. It's quite amusing that they expect stuff to be uploaded unencrypted and that limits the usefulness.

Also most of us have such a slow upload speed. That rules out using it to backup many of the important things.

I had Apple's a couple of years ago for $99/yr, but that's expensive, and it was s-l-o-w-.

I think of all of them, I will look the closest into Amazon's. Partly because I do a lot of good business with about 5 Amazon companies, and they have an Android App store that I will be working with, with my Apps I'm writing (and currently testing).

Apple charges us $99/yr PLUS SALES TAX! to belong to Apple Developer, to package our IOS Apps, to then submit to the iTunes App Store!

Amazon's is FREE. My favorite 4-letter word.