Moving to the cloud

For years, you have heard about “the cloud” and companies have extolled the virtues of storing all of your life on the web, but it has recently gained more attention with the launch last week of Google Drive, Google’s new cloud storage product that offers 5GB for free.

Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps at Google describes Google drive as “a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.”

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1. Get Google Drive on your desktop

For PC and Mac users, the first step is downloading Google Drive to your desktop so you can drag and drop files or save them directly to GDrive so files sync between all of your devices. We’ll link your other devices in a moment, but this is a good starting point:

2. Get Google Drive on your smartphone or tablet

Google says iPhones and iPads will soon have access to Google Drive, and there is no word on Blackberry or Windows Phones, but for now, Android users can get Google Drive on their smartphone or tablet so files saved on those devices show up on the Google Drive file just installed on your PC or Mac and vice versa:

3. Send Gmail attachments to Google Drive

This step is a bit tricky, and we assume that ifttt.com will eventually offer a way to link Gmail (or any digital service) to Google Drive, but for now, there is a hack for getting all Gmail attachments to go directly to your Google Drive. Don’t be scared by the phrases “source code” or anything, you can do this:

4. Digitally sign and/or fax any Google Drive document

Google has teamed up with HelloFax to make all documents from your GDrive easy to sign and fax from the cloud – no fax machine or paper is required. This can be done from any device at any time. Genius! Click the image to learn how:

5. Bring photos from Google Drive to Google+

Now, you can bring photos from Google Drive directly to Google+, simply add photos from your Drive to Google+ by clicking the camera icon and selecting “From Google Drive”. Click the image for more info:

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