Google Drive How Does it Work ?

I have been using Google Drive for about 3 months , and I am very impressed with it But I do not understand how it works ! I have about 5gb of files on it ,Excel files and photos JPEG . Now I can access these files INSTANTLY on my home PC , my works PC and my Tablet.....OK so far so good.
Now I understand that the files are held on a cloud server . Which I imagine, in my little brain , as a little hard drive floating about in the ether , so I can access my files anywhere....UK to Uruguay.
But this is the bit I don't get , If I click on a file it opens instantly , it does not seem to download ??? So are my 5gb of files held on each PC and the tablet using up my memory ??

TIA

 

In essence, its instant because its also on your PC. You change the file on your PC, and the changes are sent asynchronously to the cloud, so basically the change may take a few seconds to upload, but it doesn't stop you working, it just does it as a background process.

Now lets say your PC dies, or you want to access your files on another PC. Then it would download, once. Then again you're working on the local PC but the changes are syncronised with Google drive in the background, without you having to worry about it because it doesn't make you wait or anything, it just constantly plays catch-up.

 

Sorry, I told a pork pie. I was thinking of another cloud based thing (though I can't remember its name, I used it a long time ago).

Google drive is the successor to Google Docs. Its basically the same but a bit more. If its a document type that Google has an editor for, you actually edit it online, so nothing to download or upload. The file spends its entire life online. If two or more people are working together, on some document types, you get to see each other's changes in real time. Cool but can be confusing if you're both writing into the same document so you can see someone else's text appearing before your eyes while you're trying to concentrate on what you're writing.

If its a document type that Google doesn't have an editor for, then it downloads and uploads between your PC and the Google drive.

You can share links to your documents and it looks like you're moving the actual file, but really you're just moving a shortcut to the file that lives on the Google drive.

 

You can apparently set up Google Drive so that it automatically "syncs", ie keeps an up to date copy on your PC, tablet or whatever, see
http://www.itworld.com/consumerizat...s-spreadsheets-and-presentations-work-offline

If you have Google Drive on an ipad you can also make a document available offline which means you can access it when not connected to the internet. I suspect other tablets and PC's would do something similar.

How big are the files you are accessing and how fast is your broadband connection? If the files are small to medium and your connection is medium to fast, then access will seem instantaneous even if they are being downloaded.

 

My Excel files are 300kb to 600kb these I use daily , so maybe they do download quickly. Its probably me still thinking of dial up speeds , when a 1mb file was a major task to download !

 

The modern ".xlsX" format is compressed, so probably 90% smaller than the filesizes of yesteryear - which will certainly help if they have to travel over WAN Comms