Steve Dotto here.
I’m glad you’re joining me today.
Now today is the final installment in what has become a trilogy of videos on best online
storage solution.
It all started when I did a comparison between Google Drive and Dropbox.
Although Google Drive ended up being a superior product to Dropbox, as far as I was concerned
it just had more features and it ultimately was probably better value, I still chose to
say that I used Dropbox.
So I followed it up with a video of my five favorite reasons that I use Dropbox and the
reasons that I stayed with Dropbox and then I realized that I am doing a disservice to
the Google Drive community because I do think Google Drive is probably a better long term
solution.
So this is the final chapter in this story.
We’re going to take a look at the best features of Google Drive and why if you do choose Google
Drive, it is an outstanding tool.
Now of course online storage is online storage.
When you save a file, it’s stored on a web and synced on our computer.
They all work pretty much the same way regardless of which tool you use.
What makes Google Drive special?
What are some the outstanding features within Google Drive?
Number one and the first most important feature is Google Drive is not just online storage.
Google Drive, when you use and when you have Google Drive and choose it, you get not just
their storage—by the way they give you storage than anybody else—but we also have all of
Google’s online apps available to us, the ability to create word processing, spreadsheets,
documents, presentations, forms, which is outstanding—I’ve got a great video on
using Google forms which is one of the real secret benefits of Google drive—so it’s
far more than just storing your files online.
It’s also your apps for managing all of those files.
That is reason number one that Google Drive is good value.
Added to that, you get 15 gigabytes of storage right out of the gate.
And not only do you get 15 gigabytes of storage but any documents that you create in your
Google Docs in Google Drive, any word processors or spreadsheets or graphics that you create
don’t count against your quote, which means you have 15 gigabytes of outside stuff, be
it photos, be it images, be it videos, be it other text documents, PDFs.
You have 15 gigabytes and all of those tools to bring to Google Drive so that’s a big
point in the favor of Google Drive.
The second great feature in Google Drive is it’s from Google, meaning that it integrates
with all of our other Google services.
Specifically the case that I’m thinking about right now, it integrates with Gmail.
Now this is cool.
Google is the king of search.
We know that they do search better than everybody else.
Nowadays we have so much stored between our Google Drive or our Gmail that we often have
to search within those different silos of content.
Google, because they are the kings of search, have developed a way for us to search within
both silos at the same time.
So if I’m in Gmail—let me go to my Gmail—and I’m going to search for YouTube because
I’m doing some stuff on YouTube, what happens is in the search I get unified search.
I get all of my search results here that’s within my email accounts but look down here.
This search area here is coming out of my Google Drive account because I have enabled
in the Google Labs a feature called, I think, Apps Search.
Let me just go ahead and take a look and show you because this is so cool.
There it is.
It’s called Apps Search and if you read that, it says, “Extended search with Google
Docs and sites results.”
So Apps Search will find the most relevant docs and sites and show them below your Gmail
search results.
So it’s looking in our sites and it’s looking in our docs if we integrate this.
So when we’re searching in Gmail, we are getting relevant searches from other silos
of information on our system or in our account that might be relevant.
So unified search is huge.
It doesn’t sound like the sexiest thing in the world but it’s something that you’ll
end up using every day and every time you find that you start searching in Gmail but
what you were really looking for is a document, you’re going to save yourself an incredible
amount of time every single time that happens.
So that is a terrific extra feature.
Next up, number three and number three allows me to stay in the online web browser space
and show you a Chrome extension, an extension that goes into my Chrome browser.
Now the more you stay in the Google universe, the better you are when we’re talking about
this kind of stuff so I use the Chrome browser with Gmail and with Drive.
That’s a terrific combination of tools.
Now I added this extension her.
Let me find it here.
There it is.
It’s on the web store.
It’s called Save to Google Drive.
One of the features that I like best in Evernote is the ability to, whenever I’m in any web
browser, click whatever content I’m looking at into my Evernote account.
It’s a tremendous feature within Evernote.
By using this, you have something very similar within Chrome.
When you’re out, say I’m at this site and I see oh, that’s an image that I want
to use or that I want to save or I want to save this page, I then have this new extension
installed called Save to Google Drive.
If I just click here, it’s going to take this entire page and save it as a graphic
into my Google Drive where if I right-click on anything within it, I can choose to save
the image or save the link to Google Drive so that I have the same kind of quick save
functionality out of my browser into Google Drive as I do within Evernote, a nice additional
feature and it’s a quick Chrome add-on.
So integration with your browser is another great feature within Google Drive.
That brings us to the fourth feature that I wanted to talk to you about today.
The fourth feature really hearkens back to my original demo when I first compared Google
Drive to Dropbox.
One of the things that I like most about Dropbox is the ability to be able right-click on anything
within my Dropbox folder and quickly share that with somebody else.
At that time, you could do that in Windows but you couldn’t do that on the Mac within
Google Drive.
But of course these are dynamic apps.
So if I now open up my Google Drive folder here within my browser and I choose any document
within that, say I want to choose this video that I have, and I want to share that with
somebody, I can now right-click my mouse and look, I’ve got the Google Drive share option
available to me right here.
So all I do is click on Share and now I’m in the same sort of sharing environment as
I would have been within Dropbox.
I can choose who I want to share it with and be able to invite them to be able to either
collaborate or view the document.
I’ve got the same sharing capabilities, the ability to quickly share as I do within
Dropbox.
That was one of the biggest checkpoints against Google drive when I first did the review.
Now we can indeed share by right-clicking within the Drive folder on our computer, both
Mac and Windows.
That brings us to our fifth key.
The fifth key I already mentioned it at the very beginning when I was talking about how
good the value was as far as storage because any documents that are Google Docs type document,
word processors, spreadsheets that we create in the Google Drive environment don’t count
against us as far our storage quota goes.
If you want to just check out, while we’re on storage let’s just talk about how storage
works, if you want to increase the amount of storage you have within Google Drive, you
just go to the Drive Storage Menu here.
I have 15 gigabytes available to me.
As I said, that’s for just outside content.
Anything that’s in Google Drive does not count against my quota although my attachments
and stuff from email does count against my quota.
So the Drive documents don’t but Gmail does.
15 GB free and then to get another 100 GB of storage, which is a tremendous amount,
is $5 a month.
This is right in line with everybody else.
The nice thing is you don’t have to buy more than you need because you get a better
price per GB.
Sometimes, the plans will scale down.
They follow this same exact pricing all the way up.
It’s basically $5 per 100 GB all the way up as you climb the ladder.
That’s what you do if you need to add extra storage.
The final thing that I wanted to talk about today as far as Google Drive is concerned
is something called revision history.
If we go back into my Drive here, as you edit documents sometimes you need to go back and
you want an earlier version of the document of you’ve made changes to the document.
Keeping a history of your documents as you go along is something that you don’t need
very often but when you do need it, you really need it.
I can recall one of my daughters once working on a document.
It’s online so it’s always saving without you hitting save.
She actually erased everything on the page and then the document saved and she freaked
out, saying, “I’ve lost everything.
I can’t get the data.
I worked so hard on this and now it’s all gone and I have to start all over again.”
There were tears.
I said wait a minute, they have something called revision history.
Let me show you how revision history works because it allows you go back and view previous
versions of the document very, very easily.
Let’s find one of the documents, one of the columns that I wrote.
There it is, Good Life.
So this is a document that I would have edited many times as I was putting it together.
It was an article for a magazine.
If I go under the File menu here and choose ‘See revision history’ every time that
that document and saved again, any time that I made any changes to it, it’s listed out
there.
So you see that mainly I did it between the 3rd and the 5th of November a year ago.
But I went into it several times.
I edited it and made changes and all of those changes if we click on it at any point here
within it, we’ll see what changes were made at that point.
All of the different changes appear when we take a look at that particular revision.
Revision history allows you to go back, find mistakes and correct problems.
The bottom line, all of these cloud storage devices are outstanding and every time I post
one of these videos, people talk about boxing and other storage tools that are available.
They’re all good but for me, I do still like Dropbox.
I think it’s an outstanding tool but Google Drive has Google behind it and Google is going
to win most of the time right now in the online space.
The integration between it and Gmail and all of the other apps in Chrome really make it
a really intelligent choice.
Even if you don’t use this, your online storage solution, you should master it and
use it for storage that’s appropriate within the Google universe because nothing is going
to do a better job.
It’s great value for the free money that you’re spending and learning the little
tricks and techniques within Google Drive is going to be time well spent.
I hope you found watching this video today to be time well spent.
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I’m Steve Dotto.
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