My first impressions about Google Drive

As a prelude to the impending reformat I have been putting off, I decided yesterday to organise, to an extent, my files. I started categorising them and put them into the right places of the directory tree that I created inside Dropbox, so that my all my files would stay synchronised all the time. Now, this is not the first time I have attempted this. I remember doing something similar in 2008 on my old 333MHz computer, even downloading a Total Commander-like multi-panel replacement for Windows Explorer. I tried it again with my external hard disk some months ago, after I switched from Windows 7. I think there may have been other instances, but I can't recall them immediately. Anyway, this time, I hope to stick to the structure so that I don't have to go through this sorting and re-sorting process all over again. At least not in the near future.

While I was organising my files, I recalled my files that I had stored in Google Docs. Some of those files belonged in the organised folder structure that I had created. So I downloaded Google Drive, and after some testing, nested its folder inside my Dropbox folder. My rationale was that I would keep my most frequently accessed or edited documents in the Google Drive folder so that I may view and edit them from the university, and move the more infrequently accessed ones outside it, to wherever it belongs in Dropbox. While I was doing this, I noticed that most of the files inside the folder were associated with Google Chrome, rather than a local word processor; further investigation revealed that the files in question had a .gdoc extension.

"How convenient", I thought. Now I would be able to open the documents straight in Google Docs, and if I needed to, I could probably open them up in another office program. I started moving some of the .gdoc files to other locations in my Dropbox folder, outside Google Drive. Out of curiosity, I thought I would check if these files really would open in other office suites. If not, I could just open them in Google Docs and export them to the format I needed them in. I dragged the file into OpenOffice.org Writer, revealing the file to be merely a link to the document that is actually stored on Google's servers. That's right. The file contains a line of text which identifies that file, and Google Docs opens this file from Google's servers. Your actual file never gets stored on your computer. Note that this is only for files in Google Docs' format. Files in formats, like PDF, do get downloaded and can be opened in your local PDF viewer (which, ironically, is Google Chrome, in my case). Anyway, when the link files are moved outside the Drive folder, the Doc gets moved to the Bin in Google Docs. I found this rather disappointing. I had hoped for a system where I could save a file into Drive and edit it in Docs and local office suites without having to convert between formats. I have exported the files I needed to take out, to standard formats now. Docs integration was probably the biggest thing about Google Drive for me, but it has turned out to be little more than clever shortcuts.