Introduction to Google Drive

Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. It was launched on 24 April 2012. The Google Drive allows users to store files on its server, synchronize files on equipment and share them. The Google Drive also includes the features that allow users to view and edit office files, drawings, forms, and so on directly on the website. Files are edited through the office suite stored in the Google Drive.

For each Gmail account, you are provided the capacity of 15GB free of charge on the Google Drive, and you can store your files there. If you want to have more capacity to use, you can buy from Google. Below is a reference list of prices:

• https://drive.google.com/settings/storage

15GB	Free
100GB	1.99$ / month
1TB	9.99$ / month
10TB+	99.99$ / month

As of March 2017, Google Drive has 800 million active users, and as of September 2015, it has over one million organizational paying users. As of May 2017, there are over two trillion files stored on the service.

To use the Google Drive, it is very simple. First, you need to have a Gmail account, and log in your Gmail account. And you can see the  Google Drive like the following illustration:

You can drag & drop the files from your computer to the Google Drive easily, and download or share  them.

By default, for each Gmail account, you get 15GB of free storage on Googe Drive. However, if you want to have more storage you need to pay Google, in which case you need to upgrade Google Drive.

Google accepts credit card payments, here's the Google Drive price list:

15GB	Free
100GB	1.99$ / month
1TB	9.99$ / month
2TB	19$ / month
10TB	99.99$ / month
20TB	199$ / month

For application developers, the Google Drive API is very interesting. The Google Drive API is a library in order to interact with the Google Drive, which supports most programming languages. That means you can write an application to store your data (files) on the Google Drive, for example, for a Web application, the data such as images, attachments can be put on the Google Drive by you  instead of putting them on your server.

Begin with the Google Drive API (Documents of Google):

• https://developers.google.com/drive/