Google has announced the pooling of the available cloud storage for users of its services including Gmail, Drive and Google+ Photos. Now instead of having an allocation of 10GB for Gmail and the comparatively small amount of 5GB available to your Drive documents and Google+ photos you will have 15GB of storage to use willy-nilly.
Free is the magic word, now we hope that DropBox and Microsoft SkyDrive will react.
Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management at Google, wrote on the Google Drive Blog; “With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.”
This is a welcome user-friendly move by Google as the separate walled storage divided between Google’s integrated online services “doesn’t make as much sense anymore,” says Bavor.
We are also informed that the Google Drive Storage Page will be updated to provide a handy visual pie chart breakdown of your cloud storage usage. Such charts provide a quick and easy way to see how much storage you are using and what is using up your available space. This is also a page where Google will try and tempt you to pay for a storage space upgrade for a monthly fee.
click to zoom-in
Pooled storage will be implemented soon
The cloud storage pool upgrade “will roll out over the next couple of weeks”. It hasn’t happened for my Google account yet. Also let’s hope this indirect storage upgrade to Google Drive positively influences rivals such as DropBox and Microsoft SkyDrive to upgrade their free usage limits.
