5 ways to get more out of Google Drive storage

You may love it for its free productivity suite, but Google Drive is first and foremost a cloud storage service. As the nexus of Google’s other services, its 15GB of free space can be leveraged to improve almost any productivity task. Here are a few ways you can maximize your Drive.

1. Set it as your default document location

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already using Google Drive as your go-to storage option. You can streamline this process by making it the default save location for all your documents on your PC.
In Windows, right-click on your Documents folder and select Properties. Click Include a folder, then locate your Google Drive folder. Highlight it, select Set save location, and click Apply. Next time you save a Google or Microsoft file, it will save to Drive.

2. Attach Drive files to Gmail

The ability to insert Google Drive files into your Gmail messages provides a few significant advantages over uploading files as attachments from your hard drive. First, it allows you to email larger files. Gmail caps file attachments from your computer at 25MB. But if you insert a file direct from Google Drive, you can send a file up to 15GB—and up to 1TB if you have a paid plan.

You can insert Drive files into your Gmail messages as an attachment or a link.

Inserting Drive files also makes collaboration more efficient. Normally if you send a collaborative document to multiple people, you’ll be returned a separate version of that document from each recipient, from which you’ll have to compile feedback into a master doc. But because Google Drive’s productivity apps—Docs, Sheets, and Slides—make each collaborator’s comments and changes visible in real time to everyone that file is shared with, there’s no need to pass several versions of the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation back and forth.
Lastly, inserting a Google Drive file gives you greater control over who sees it. When you attach a local file to an email, there’s nothing to prevent a recipient from forwarding it on to unauthorized viewers. But because Drive’s sharing feature lets you designate who can access a file—and change those sharing settings at any time—you’ll have more peace of mind when emailing sensitive material.
To insert a file from Google Drive, click the Drive icon at the bottom of your Gmail message and select the file from your Drive account. You can insert it as a link to the original file or as an attachment.

3. Share many files at one time

Emailing attachments is fine when you need to send just one or two standalone files. But if you need to distribute many files to the same group of people, it’s better to compile all the files into a folder and then share it.

When you need to send many files, you can add them to a folder and share it.

To do this, open the folder containing all the files and click the share icon (it looks like a person with plus sign next to it) in the upper right. Enter the email addresses for each person you want to share the folder with and select the type of access for them—for folders you can give them either viewing or editing privileges. Type any instructions in the message field and hit send. Each recipient will be notified that you’ve share a folder with them. Once you’ve shared a folder, any files you add to it will be shared with the same access rights.

4. Save web content

One of the perks of data collection apps like Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote is the ability to easily capture content from the web and save it online. You can do much the same in Google Drive with the help of the Save to Google Drive extension for the Chrome browser.

Install the Save to Google Drive extension to capture web content.

Once you’ve installed the extension, click the Drive icon in the Chrome toolbar to save the currently viewed webpage. You can save it as a screenshot (the whole page or just the visible portion), a web archive, or HTML by configuring the extension options. You can also save any documents, images, links, or HTML5 audio and video by right clicking on the object and selecting Save to Google Drive from the drop-down menu.

5. Manage your Drive space

If you find yourself bumping up against Google Drive’s 15GB storage limit, you can always check which of Google’s services—Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos—are eating up the most space by hovering over the usage data in the lower left corner of your Drive page. Clicking on it will show you the same data in a pie chart.

When you need to audit your storage, Drive lets you know which of Google’s services is consuming the most space.

From there, you can either start pruning files or upgrade to a paid plan. Currently, Google offers 100GB for $2/month, 1TB for $10/month, 10TB for $100/month, 20TB for $200/month, and 30TB for $300/month.

What is Big Data? The Basics – Meaning and Usage

The term Big Data is being increasingly used almost everywhere on the planet – online and offline. And it is not related to computers only. It comes under a blanket term called Information Technology, which is now part of almost all other technologies and fields of studies and businesses. Big Data is not a big deal. The hype surrounding it is sure pretty big deal to confuse you. This article takes a look at what is Big Data. It also contains an example on how NetFlix used its data, or rather, Big Data, to better serve its clients’ needs.

What is Big Data

The data lying in the servers of your company was just data until yesterday – sorted and filed. Suddenly, the slang Big Data got popular and now the data in your company is Big Data. The term covers each and every piece of data your organization has stored till now. It includes data stored in clouds and even the URLs that you bookmarked. Your company might not have digitized all the data. You may not have structured all the data already. But then, all the digital, papers, structured and non-structured data with your company is now Big Data.
In short, all the data – whether or not categorized – present in your servers is collectively called BIG DATA. All this data can be used to get different results using different types of analysis. It is not necessary that that all analysis use all the data. Different analysis uses different parts of the BIG DATA to produce the results and predictions necessary.
Big Data is essentially the data that you analyze for results that you can use for predictions and for other uses. When using the term Big Data, suddenly your company or organization is working with top level Information technology to deduce different types of results using the same data that you stored intentionally or unintentionally over years.

How big is Big Data

Essentially, all the data combined is Big Data but many researchers agree that Big Data – as such – cannot be manipulated using normal spreadsheets and regular tools of database management. They need special analysis tools like Hadoop (we’ll study this in a separate post) so that all the data can be analyzed at one go (may include iterations of analysis).
Contrary to the above, though I am not an expert on the subject, I would say that data with any organization – big or small, organized or unorganized – is Big Data for that organization and that the organization may choose its own tools to analyze the data.