What is Google Drive?

Today, many of us have started using, or have been told to start using, Google Drive. I get many questions about this, and I thought I’d write a brief and simple blog post to explain what Google Drive is all about.

Isn’t “drive” a verb?!

Let’s start with the word “Drive”. You’re first thought might be that “drive” is a verb, but it has been used as a noun for many years among nerds. It all started a long time ago when computers’ screens were still black and just had a small flashing line (a prompt) where you had to type commands to get the computer to do what you wanted. The person who administered the computer needed to know quite a few different commands to make things happened inside the computer. One of these commands was the command “drive”, used as a verb. This command awakened different attached devices so the computer could display their content. These devices could be a hard drive, a specific part of the hard drive or a floppy disk you had brought from home.

Soon, this word “drive” started to be used as a noun, and the units themselves began to be called “drives” among technicians. You could hear questions like, “which drive is the file on?”. All those letters you see on the computer like C:, D: etc. are different “drives”. Therefore, a drive can be several various things, but they have in common that they can store data, just like a warehouse or a barn.

What about the cloud-thing?!

These days, the drives are no longer limited to stay on the computers. Instead, they have flown up to become clouds. There are several advantages since you can always reach your cloud from different devices like your phone or tablet. Another “pro” is that the cloud providers are excellent at backing up everything, and your data is safe as a bird in its nest.

What about Google? Google is one of many cloud providers that you can use for free or use the expanded payment service. Microsoft has a cloud as well (of course) they call OneDrive. You can also find clouds from smaller companies and which one you prefer is a matter of taste. You can think of all these different clouds as real clouds in the sky that float by — the Google-cloud with all its various colours and the Microsoft-cloud in blue shades.

The clouds have just about every upside that you can find!

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Google Drive is your warehouse!

A common mistake is to think that Google Drive is primarily a place where you share documents and where others can see your files. This is wrong! Google Drive is primarily your warehouse, and this is very important. You decide how folders and files should be organized and what settings you want for notifications and the like. I sometimes get the question from colleagues if I can not stop sending an email every time I share a document with them, but of course, I can not. Everyone who uses Google Drive can decide if they want notifications when they receive a file or not.

The three main parts of Google Drive are “My device”, “Shared devices” and “Shared with me”, but it is only in the folder “shared devices” that the environment is shared by everyone. In this part of your Google Drive, folders are shared, and everything you do in this section will affect how others see it. If you move a folder, it will be moved for everyone when they visit this device (this barn!). This does not apply in the “shared with me” section where individual files are located. In this part, you may have the files organized one way while your colleague prefers another. You may have a folder called “from Jenny”, and the college has one called “from Maria”. You can definitely move the files from “Shared with me” to “My Device” to have everything in one place. But now I’m getting into the usage of Google Drive, and I’ll write more about that in a future post.

I hope you feel that you’ve got a better idea of what Google Drive is all about and that you might even think it seems pretty fun!