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WEB SERVICES - ONLINE STORAGE SPACE - 25.05.2012

Compared: Google Drive, Skydrive and Dropbox

Google Drive has finally been launched and both SkyDrive and Dropbox have been revamped. We look at the improvements in Skydrive and Dropbox and the options offered by newcomer Google Drive.

Magic folder

Dropbox, Microsoft SkyDrive as well as Google Drive basically offer their users a “magic folder”, in other words, a folder on your hard drive whose content is synced with your online storage space. As a result, you have access to your “cloud drive” from your computer, smartphone or tablet, wherever you are.

Dropbox

Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com) is probably the most popular cloud drive. Apart from its web interface, Dropbox has for a long time been offering dedicated applications for a wide variety of devices (PCs, Macs, Linux machines, iOS and Android) which allow you to access your Dropbox easily. Dropbox is currently the most used default cloud storage space by other iOS and Android apps. Dropbox is easy to use, it’s equipped with lots of features and the service is frequently updated. For instance, you can upload files via drag and drop simply by dragging them to the Dropbox page in your browser. Its photo function now lets you view your photos and videos directly in your Dropbox. Finally, you can always revert to an earlier version, even if you had deleted a file. Thoughtful!

SkyDrive

SkyDrive (http://www.skydrive.com) was originally an app for the iPhone, but it has also become available for the iPad and Windows Phone. You can now upload multiple photos or videos at once and view your SkyDrive files in other iOS apps, such as Adobe Reader. You can create and move folders, rename and delete files etc.

However, the main innovation is the SkyDrive desktop application (https://apps.live.com/skydrive) for Windows and Mac. This tool makes it child’s play to sync files sitting in one or more folders with your SkyDrive via Windows Explorer. A special feature is that if you’ve installed the SkyDrive application on several Windows computers, you can access all synced folders on these computers from the SkyDrive webpage after logging in with your Windows Live ID.

Google Drive

A new player in the storage space war is Google Drive (https://drive.google.com). Here again, you can work via your browser or a dedicated application for PCs, Macs and Android devices (there’s no iOS version as yet). The most striking feature of Google Drive is the tight integration with all the other Google services. For example, you no longer need to actually attach a large file to a Gmail message: a link to this attachment on your Google Drive will do. You can search for content in your Google Drive files or filter them by type, owner etc. You don’t even need to have the application associated with a particular file in order to open it, as Google Drive lets you open more than 30 different file types from within your Chrome browser. You can, of course, create documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Google Docs and save them directly in your Google Drive.

Tip. The Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/drive_apps) now also has a separate category of web apps which use Google Drive.

If you are a fervent user of Google services, try Google Drive for its tight integration with, e.g., Google Docs and Gmail. Otherwise, Dropbox and SkyDrive are highly versatile alternative online storage spaces.