It almost seem like the Google Drive was no longer a secret a couple of days back with leaks of the service showing up on tech blogs and when Google finally unveils their cloud storage service, I was genuinely excited about it and was ready to dive in and see what it is all about.
I’m a huge Google Docs user, moving all my spreadsheet and document needs all onto Google Docs and this has practically made DropBox redundant for me so I’m really excited to see what value Google Drive can add to my documents workflow.
Unfortunately, when I tried to activate the Google Drive service, I was greeted with this disappointing message.
Nevertheless, there were enough reports around the interwebs and the common consensus was that Google Drive was not a service that was born to compete against the likes of Dropbox, Skydrive or iCloud but it’s an evolution of Google Docs.
For the ones that have Google Drive activated or installed on their machines, it replaces the Google Docs and any documents placed into the desktop Google Drive folder syncs online onto the web and all users will get 5gb of space for free.
But what really struck me was the pricing structures Google had in place for the if you need additional storage space for the new service and it seems that they have increased prices significantly and this was a snapshot of the new pricing tier on Google’s support page for pricing for Drive. The grandfathered pricing is on the left and new pricing on the right.
I’m currently on the grandfathered 20gb $5/year plan and was in the midst of backing up my digital photos on Picasa when the announcement for Google Drive dropped. The bad news is I’ve got a whole lot more photos to go through for backups and if I were to increase the size of my plan, I’ll be moved onto the new monthly pricing structure and cost of a 200gb plan would be $70 more on the new pricing structure.
I guess I’ll just have to go back to using Flickr Pro for my photography back ups.
Google Drive is currently available for Mac OS X, Windows and Android and the iOS version is reportedly 98% ready and will be available soon. I’ll be waiting with baited breath just to be able to have it available for me to use at all.
