Google Part 1 – GDrive

Google is part of everyday life for me, it’s become something that I can’t live without and I can’t work without. This is the first post of many in which I’ll write about some of the cool things you can do with Google and there suites of software and websites.

This post is all about the GDrive an extension for Windows Explorer that allows you to use your Gmail account to store files. I know it’s a bit of an odd place to start but a I was talking about it over the weekend and a friend asked me to please give him the link to it.

You find the Shell Extension here it’s a pretty small download (about 135k) and what it does is add’s a GDrive entry to your My Computer all you then have todo is fill in your login details and you can easily copy your files into it.

The files then appear in Gmail as email’s coming from your self with the file attached, this makes it very easy to download the file if you’re not near your computer.

There are a few limitations like the filename can’t be longer than 65 characters and it does use your freespace on Gmail so you’re limited to about 2gb storage space, but it’s convenient and easy to use.

The way the GDrive works is pretty neat, all it’s basically doing is emailing your self with the file attached, the nice part of it however is the fact that it can be dragged and dropped to from Windows. I know there are versions available for Mac OSX and Linux but I haven’t played with them yet… I’ll play with them a bit when I get a chance and tell you what I think of them.