Google Drive Is Live With 5GB Of Free Storage And Google Docs Hookup

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You can now try Google Drive, Google’s Dropbox competitor, at drive.google.com.

UPDATE – The app is now available for download and I installed it, creating a folder on my computer that acts as a GDrive sync area. All of my Google Docs appeared as “icons” in the folder.

And I was able to drag in files from my PC.

Files that I added to the local folder appeared in the web interface instantly.

As you can see, the functionality works as expected and was nearly seamless. Free accounts get 5GB of space and you can upgrade to 25GB for $2.49 a month. One hundred gigabytes of storage can be had for $4.99 a month, and 1TB will set you back $49.99 monthly. Upgrading to a paid account will also boost the available storage space on your GMail account to 25GB. The documents that appear in the computer’s folder are actually links to Google Docs which open a separate browser window for editing. For example, this is the contents of one .gdoc file on my PC:

No text is stored in the actual .gdoc file.

As a bonus, Google just announced the availability of 10GB of storage in GMail, up from the standard 7GB “to celebrate today’s launch of Google Drive.”