Lately I’ve been looking at two cloud-based file storage and sharing services; Google Drive and Dropbox. Both platforms offer a 100% web-based environment with synchronization capabilities to your local computer. Meaning, a folder is created on your computer that houses an “offline” copy of all of your stuff. Both services also allow you to share your stuff, or invite people to share/access your stuff. Great! Google Drive offers 5gb of storage space, while Dropbox offers 2gb of storage space. Dropbox allows you to refer friends and as a result your storage capacity will increase based upon how many successful referrals you made. Not a bad idea either. Both services now have apps for your iOS devices so you can access your files. The mobile apps for both services are great for viewing your stuff, but when it comes to editing they both seem to equally fall short. I’m convinced that this capability is just a matter of development before it is available.

Ultimately I chose to move everything to Google Drive. Here’s why……Google Drive allows you to open files within the Google Apps platform. You can do this from any computer with Internet access without having to have Microsoft Office or another productivity suite installed to access your stuff. Sharing within Google Docs is also a bit more user friendly. You’re not waiting for someone to accept or respond to an invitation you sent out. The content is just simply shared with the second person’s Google Docs account. I’ll just wait for the update to Google Drive that allows editing to occur right within the iOS app itself.