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Google Drive details revealed in Google France blog post

Google Drive details revealed in Google France blog post

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Google Drive, the search giant's new cloud storage service, is hardly a secret anymore, but now we've got a handful of new details. The new information comes courtesy of an accidentally-published post on the Google France blog. As expected, the service will offer users 5GB of free storage space, a quota that doesn't include the 1GB of space included with Google Docs.

Google Drive
Google Drive

Google Drive, the search giant's new cloud storage service, is hardly a secret anymore, but now we've got a handful of new details. The new information comes courtesy of an accidentally-published post on the Official Google France Enterprise Blog. While the post has since been deleted, Google+ user François Bacconnet saved a copy of the text, and the translated document spills all of the details on Google Drive. As expected, the service will offer users 5GB of free storage space, a quota that doesn't count against the 1GB of space included with Google Docs. According to the translation, Google Apps for Business users will also be able to get a 20GB option for $4 per month, and another with a monumental 16TB, although no price is given for that seemingly implausible amount of cloud storage. It's not clear yet if those storage amounts will be identical for consumers, or whether these quotas are just for Google Apps for Business users. The company promises the service will have a 99.9 percent uptime.

Google Docs and Drive will work hand-in-hand, according to the blog post, with the new cloud storage service being called the "next step in the evolution of Google Docs." It's said that you'll be able to search your Google Drive and it'll pull up not only file and folder names, but also text inside of documents, words picked up in a scanned document via OCR, and image matches using what sounds like the same technology found in Google Googles. Of course, with Google being Google, all of this works in the web browser: the company says that it can handle over 30 filetypes, including those from Photoshop and Illustrator. There will also be native apps for PC, Mac, and Android, with an iOS version "available in the coming weeks." It's said that more advanced options like the ability to attach Google Drive files to Gmail messages and what sounds like an API for third-party developers are in the works, but they may not be available when the service first launches. While this all seems legitimate, we'll have to wait until Google officially announces the service — something that may happen as soon as later today — before we can take any of this information as fact.

Update: Google Drive is now official.

Thanks, jordan.mcrae!