It’s silly to have multiple storage locations for your various Google products, and Google seems to have finally realized that. They’ve combined user storage between Gmail, Drive, and Google+ to give you 15 GB of combined storage in one common place. At the very least, that’s convenient for users, but if you’re like me and don’t use a lot of space with Gmail or Google+ then Google just upgraded your Drive account to 15 GB for free. Hooray!
Five gigs of free cloud storage is pretty great, but it fills up surprisingly quickly with stuff like baby pictures. It’s nice to suddenly have more room. They’ve also made it easier to see how much storage you’re using, and on which services. If you’ve purchased an upgrade for Gmail, you’re no longer capped at 25 GB and that storage is combined as well.
The news came on the Google Drive Blog from Clay Bavor Director of Project Management. Bavor said:
With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.
This is a great move by Google, because they’ve essentially tripled the amount of free cloud storage users can have without really having to do much on their end. This suddenly makes Drive a much more appealing option for anyone considering which cloud storage service to use.
(Google Drive Blog via Engadget)
- Google Hangouts just added a remote desktop feature
- BitTorrent just made their cloudless storage option available
- I really like Google’s note-taking app Keep
