It wasn’t long ago that we relayed to you the imminent launch of Google Drive. It appears that now we have full details of the service, courtesy of an early posting on the French Google blog, which was quickly pulled down but not before TechCrunch could snag a copy.
Drive allows for the opening of over 30 types of documents directly from your browser, including video, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, even if you don’t have the apps installed. As we suspected, Drive is going to interface with your existing Google Docs account, but Docs storage won’t count against your Drive limit.
As for that limit? Not surprisingly it’s 5 GB, with additional 20 GB blocks available for $4 per month, up to a maximum of 16 TB. Interestingly, it appears that Drive will be available for Google Apps accounts starting today and Google is promising a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If your company hasn’t signed up for the quick launch option with Google services your administrator will see access in the coming weeks.
“Google Drive uses the same infrastructure as any other Google Apps services, which means it also has the same administrative tools, security and reliability, among others”
Google is touting its search function for Drive, which will allow users to search by document type, owner, activity and more. If a document happens to have been scanned in via OCR technology, Drive’s search function can even search within the text. In future updates, image search will be available as well.
We’re expecting the official launch of Google Drive within the next couple of hours, so hang tight while we dig deeper. What’s probably most interesting about this is that Google appears to be aiming directly for Box.net and other “professional” storage services rather than Dropbox and consumer-focused ones.
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