Resources

Google Drive

What is Google Drive?

G Drive

Google Drive is a cloud storage service…
Essentially, it’s a beefed-up version of Google Docs. You can store your documents, photos, music, videos, etc. all in one place. It syncs with your mobile devices and your computer, so if you make a change from one gadget, it will automatically show up if you were to access it elsewhere.

It tracks your changes too, so if you make an edit to the document and hit save, you can still look back at all your revisions from the past 30 days. Of course it relies heavily on Google search, with image recognition for browsing your photos and some OCR capabilities for sniffing out text in pictures.

You’ll be able to open things you saved in Google Drive using other service; it can handle more than 30 different types of files, including Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and HD video, and you don’t even have to have those programs installed on your computer. So for example, if you squirreled away a music file, you could listen to it later on whatever player you please. Drive also pretty much does away with email attachments, which makes sharing a lot easier. If you wanted to show a friend a video of your vacation, you could just pass them a link to that file, rather than adding it to a clunky message. You wouldn’t have to upload it to a message and your friend wouldn’t have to wait around to download a big file.

Though Apple’s iCloud only caters to iOS users, the Google counterpart is open to all platforms. It’s easily accessible from a wide variety of devices, like Android tablets and phones, as well as the iPad and the iPhone. You can also download Drive for your Mac or PC.

 

Google Drive Tutorial Video

This 11 minute video (external link) shows you the capabilities of Google Drive and how to use it. Keep in mind that it is not DCDS specific, so login process and a few other items will vary for users. 

Google Drive Tutorial Screen Shots