Google drive: backup and share documents privately

Think of Google Drive as your hard disk/drive on the internet (your private space on Google's hard disk on their server). With a Google login, and the Google Drive software installed on your device, you can do the following:

• Save/backup files on the cloud and access from anywhere - 15GB drive space is free across Drive, Gmail and other Google products.
• Share the files with privacy/security.
• Files can even be edited simultaneously by yourself and and your collaborators.
• Files can be easily attached to mails if you use GMail.

Buy additional space when you need. Hardware keeps getting cheaper while the size of hard disks has been going up. So the cost of space you own keeps goes down.

Important features for sharing

• File could be shared by specifying the e-mail addresses of those with whom you wish to share (recipients)
• Specifying e-mail address is a better option than using links to share files. 
• Private sharing is possible only if the recipient is on Google+.
• Recipients can be permitted to just view files, or even edit files. 
• The feature to download a shared file can be disabled. 
• A shared file cannot be downloaded by those who can only view that file. 
• Those who are permitted to edit a file can also download it. Use the check box in the details section of the file to prevent download. 
• If you install Google Drive on your device, selected folders on it could be synchronized with the cloud drive (on Windows, right click on the Google drive icon in the notification area at the bottom right). An example usage scenario is when you would like to back up everything to Google Drive, but wouldn't want to retain all of these on the laptop as the space available is limited. 
• Upto 15GB is free. $2 upto 100GB. $10 upto 1TB - see this for how prices have declined over the years. 

Other options

• Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive and Amazon's Cloud Drive are alternatives. 

Photos and video

• Photos and video shot with devices from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon can be stored for free in their respective cloud drives. For Android phones, storage for photos and video is virtually unlimited on Google Photos.
• Subscription to Amazon Prime gives you unlimited storage for photos. If you don't get Amazon Prime or an Amazon device, its cloud storage is expensive.

My readers and I would like to hear your experience in sharing documents, photos and video via the cloud.