Is google drive an actual alternative to box/dropbox? I thought that if you uploaded (say) a .doc file, google drive changed it to a google docs file (which could be re-exported via docs->Word converter rather being copied out untransformed). This made me concerned that uploaded pictures would be down sampled etc.
I also seem to remember that if you click on a google doc file it opens a browser window rather than launching an app on your machine.
So I stopped trying to use it on my laptop. This system may have changed, or there may have been a way to avoid this.
I do use google docs/drive but only as a way to use docs that others have created and shared with me. I have noticed on iOS that opening docs shows a different set of files than opening the google drive app, which also does not reassure me.
It would be interesting to me if it were a true DB replacement. Of course since I now have to use Office 365 I just got unlimited Onedrive capacity so I may switch to that.
There is an option (and has been for a while now) to upload files to Google Drive without converting them to Google's formats. So your opaque binary blobs will stay opaque binary blobs.
That said, in my experience, Google Drive and Dropbox still differ on the handling of corner cases (e.g. symlinks, permissions and extended attributes, etc.). At the time I tested, Google Drive was lagging in most of these cases, but that may have improved by now.
At any rate: check that your use cases actually work before moving all your data!
I also seem to remember that if you click on a google doc file it opens a browser window rather than launching an app on your machine.
So I stopped trying to use it on my laptop. This system may have changed, or there may have been a way to avoid this.
I do use google docs/drive but only as a way to use docs that others have created and shared with me. I have noticed on iOS that opening docs shows a different set of files than opening the google drive app, which also does not reassure me.
It would be interesting to me if it were a true DB replacement. Of course since I now have to use Office 365 I just got unlimited Onedrive capacity so I may switch to that.