A Little Closer to Gdrive: Google Docs Stores Files of All Sorts

By  |  Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 9:31 am

People have been talking about Gdrive–a theoretical online storage service from Google–for eons. It still isn’t here, but Google keeps tippy-toeing towards offering the functionality we all assumed it would have. Back in November, the company started offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. And now it’s announcing that it’s letting users of its Google Docs online productivity suite store any sort of file in their Google Docs Web-based repository, not just ones that work with the service’s applications. That makes Google Docs into a virtual hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

You get 1GB of storage for free, and can store files up to 250MB in size; additional space is 25 cents a gigabyte a year, the same lowball price as far the Gmail/Picasa storage. The company is also rolling out a version of this offering for big companies that use the fee-based version of Google Docs; that one charges $3.50 a gigabyte a year, but permits automated syncing of files through a new version of Memeo and other apps.

None of this is anything radical, but there’s one interesting feature; Since Google Docs lets you share folders with colleagues, it’ll be easy to upload files of any sort which relate to a collaborative project you’re working on, so everyone involved can get at them. Which seems to be the basic benefit that Google is trying to provide here.

This still isn’t the Gdrive that people used to fantasize about–the one that let users store 100% of their data online and easily sync it between multiple devices. Probably for free. But it’s the closest that Google has come to date.

Incidentally, Google’s explanation of the new feature says “Google Docs now supports files up to 250MB in size.” When I try to upload existing files for editing in Google Docs’ apps, it still warns me that there are file-size limits: 500KB of text for word-processing files, 10MB for presentations, 1MB for spreadsheets, and 10MB for PDF files. Those caps are small enough that they’ve sometimes prevented me from using files in Google Docs.  I hope they’re going away, but I have a query in to Google for clarification.

[UPDATE: A Google representative told me the limits are still in place.]

 
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4 Comments For This Post

  1. Christopher Young Says:
    January 12th, 2010 at 10:53 am

    I love Google Docs, but this is disappointing. The 250mb limit is pointless because it does not apply to the dozen or so most popular formats, such as .doc, .pdf, etc.

  2. heulenwolf Says:
    January 12th, 2010 at 1:15 pm

    This sounds to me like more preparation for ChromeOS. Since ChromiumOS doesn’t currently provide users access to local storage – as far as I can tell from hexxeh’s builds – they’ll need to give users access to their non-app files online. I’m assuming the 64 GB flash SSD’s they say will be in their netbook will not be directly accessible by the user, as well. Its hard to imagine that all being web app cache and the stripped-down OS (hexxeh’s build runs from a 1GB flash drive), but I suppose its possible it could all be dedicated to that. If that’s the case, then they’ll have to dramatically increase the amount of on-line storage they provide to justify all that local caching. What’s the point of local caching if you have more local storage than you do on-line?

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    February 10th, 2010 at 1:11 pm

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  4. Cloud Security Guy Says:
    February 18th, 2011 at 8:21 am

    The 250MB cap is pretty low, but there’s also Glide, which provides 30GB of free storage, and doesn’t collect user data in the same way as Google… just a few extra perks that Google Docs doesn’t have.

    At the ccskguide.org, we take a look at cloud computing security issues. We also help prepare candidates for the CCSK Cloud Security Certification. Check out our blog post on Glide OS: http://ccskguide.org/2011/01/glide-os/

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