google drive

You’re out and about, you snap photos — then you drop your phone. A shattered screen stares back at you, and your info is just tied to what is now a really expensive external drive. This is why cloud storage is so neat — you can remotely store your files without worry of damage to the hardware. It’s even better with automatic backups, so news that Google Drive may soon allow for automatic backups of photos is really enticing, especially for those who don’t want to sign up for a Google+ account.

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Google Drive might be the best cloud storage solution there is. It’s available anywhere, securely tucks your files away, and is free to use. For mobile, it’s amazing. For the desktop, Drive is fairly utilitarian, but that’s about to change. Today, Google is announcing a few changes to Drive for PC and Mac, which will give users more control and a new menu. The new-look drop-down menu provides updates on uploads, and even gives you access to recently synced items.

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While the concept of "the cloud" has been around for more than a few years now, it still feels like the idea, and use, of "cloud storage" was adopted at such a rapid rate. And that makes sense, looking at how the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets has exploded in the last 7-8 years. As evidence of the importance of cloud storage these days, a new report has found that half of all mobile photographers rely on cloud services in some way for keeping their photos.

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With yet another holiday fast approaching, Google is trying to help make your vacation planning a lot easier, and keep you inside its ecosystem of services while doing so. But even if you're not dreaming of your remote island getaway, getting Google's My Maps creation tool inside Google Drive is still a convenience for any traveler, or even just a digital surveyor, as it puts all your custom-made maps in a single location, stored on Google's cloud, of course.

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Google Drive and Docs are popular, but for the increasingly competitive enterprise space, Office reigns supreme. Until recently, you and your work mates had to make an ad hoc decision to go with Office or Docs, which likely caused some consternation. Even if you all got on the same page, files coming from the outside likely weren’t of the Google Docs variety. They were also likely emailed. To help on both fronts, Google ahs updated Docs routinely, and the latest lets you edit Office files from within Gmail.

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As far as cloud storage solutions go, Apple’s iCloud is among the oddest. A company with massive resources and deep pockets should be able to provide a clean, cohesive experience for users. They can’t; iCould and iDrive are just not as good as other cloud storage offerings. From layout to syncing — even down to pricing — iCloud is a mis-hit from Apple. They’re sticking with it, though, so a silver lining exists. A new report details why the cloud in front of iCloud is so dark, though.

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It's one of those features that Google Drive/Docs users have been able to use for so long that it's almost expected by now: real-time chat with others while collaborating on documents. As Microsoft has been pushing its Office programs like Word, Powerpoint, and Excel into the cloud recently, users of Office Online are finally able to communicate via built-in Skype chat.

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Are you in the market for a new computer this holiday shopping season? If so, Chromebooks might be on your short-list of possible purchases. The pros and cons of Google’s cloud-centric computers can be debated breathlessly, but one there’s one feature that might put you over the top this year. Google is giving anyone who purchases a new Chromebook a full terabyte of cloud storage via Drive for two years. Free. that’s right, buy a Chromebook, get 1TB cloud storage for two years at no cost.

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To help get their services to a wider audience, Google has issued a Play Services update today. The aim is, naturally, getting Google stuff in more places, and making it a better experience for the end-user. Moving forward, Developers will have the ability to better control the API library they need, and use only the API they want. That will keep apps lightweight, and easy to update/support. Developers will need it, too; there are a lot of cool new things they can build into their apps!

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There are plenty of cloud storage options out there, but none quite as good as Google Drive. Google's home-grown cloud storage option is cross platform, available to anyone for free, syncs seamlessly, and is easily accessible. A big part of Google’s cloud storage footprint is on iOS, where both iPad and iPhone owners use it in place of — or addition to — iCloud. Today, Google ash upgraded Drive to suit a growing number of iOS 8 users, as well as the ever-increasing iPhone 6 user-base.

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Google continues to hammer away at the divide between what lives in the browser and what's on your computer, releasing a new extension for Chrome that allows files stored in Google Drive to be opened up directly into the relevant app. The plugin effectively further blurs the lines between the cloud and local apps, bypassing the need to first download a copy to your PC or Mac and also making it more likely that you'll have the latest version stored on Drive too.

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Google has updated Chrome for iOS to suit the higher-resolution display of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, meaning no more enlarged fonts and outsized graphics. The new version of the browser comes a day after Google released a new version of Gmail to suit the Retina HD panels on the larger handsets, fitting more information on-screen at any one time. However, the new Chrome version isn't just about a resolution change, with new Drive integration also added.

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