Tag: Google Drive

A new and improved search functionality is coming to Google Drive for G Suite Enterprise customers.  Dubbed “Intelligent Search”, users will be able to not only search for specific files in Drive like you can today, but will be able to search for contributors as well as priorities and histories of files.

As you would guess, the new Intelligent Search is driving by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to more accurately predict the information you are searching for and learn the type of content that you search frequently.

Google Drive is expected to hit a critical milestone this week:  1 Billion active users.  The news came from Google Vice President of Cloud, Diane Green during her keynote at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco.  When Drive does pass the one billion mark, it will make it the 8th Google service or app that has reached the milestone.

Currently the “Billion User Club” consists of the following from Google:

• Google Search
• Google Maps
• Google Play Store
• Android
• Chrome
• Gmail
• YouTube

It is an important milestone for Google Drive but in a broader context, it is critically important for Google.

A new update for G Suite paying customers is rolling out that brings a handful of improvements to the Google Vault feature.  With the update, you will be able to set a custom retention length of time for Hangouts Meet recording as well as be able to set a policy for user’s Drive trash folders.

For those who are not G Suite users or who are unfamiliar with it, Google Vault is your domain’s retention policy manager when you use the service from Google, allowing you to set how long things like emails and files are retained along with Hangouts Meet recordings and search results.

Google One, the Mountain View company’s new all-in-one storage, support and benefits program, is now starting to go live.  Paid subscribers to Google Drive are now getting notifications via email that their account has been converted to a One account and for them, the One app has now lit up too.

One is a central repository of sorts for your Google Drive storage and gives you the ability to share that storage with other members of your family.  It also provides you access to Google support via chat, phone or email and that support is available 24/7.    You can also adjust your drive storage account in the app, change payment methods, manage family members and even shut down your subscription.

Google has made a pretty significant announcement with regards to Google Drive today.  In a blog post, the Mountain View company announced that Google Drive would be rebranded as Google One and bring with it more storage and features.

The most visible change to Google One over Drive is the tiers and pricing structure.  For $1.99 per month, you can pick up 100GB of storage.  That is the same price as today but if you need just a little bit more, there will be a 200GB tier that will be $2.99.  Perhaps the bigger news is that current 1TB account which is $9.99 per month will double to 2TB at no additional charge.  This puts a huge amount of pressure on other cloud storage providers like Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive.

Google Backup & Sync, the desktop app that allows you to sync your Google Drive to your PC or Mac, has a nice update rolling out that brings a lot of fixes, particularly for MacOS users.  The updated version of Backup & Sync is build 3.41.9267.0638 for those keeping score at home and it is the same build for both MacOS and Windows.  The update was released last week so chances are you have been updated to this new build already.

The big news in this update is the fixing of a bug on HEIF and HEIC image files. High Efficiency Image Format, or HEIF, is pretty new and is something iOS 11.x devices use for the most part for image file formats.  When they first started hitting Google Photos and Google Drive, you could view them as you could with any other supported image format.  However a bug introduced at the beginning of the year made HEIF images not visible in Google Photos.  You could view them in Google Drive, but not Photos.  This update to Google Backup & Sync appears to have fixed the issues.