Google Drive

So why Google Drive and not one of the others? Mostly because you've got it already. Every Google account comes with 15 GB, and there's nothing to set up.

That's three times the free space OneDrive or iCloud give you. Dropbox's free plan is 2 GB.

The clever bit is that files don't just sit there. Open a Word document, a spreadsheet or a PDF and you can edit it right in Drive. Two of you can work in the same file at once.

Sharing is a link. You pick whether the other person can view, comment or edit, and that's it. Think "here's the wedding budget, comments only please".

The phone app scans paper as well. Point it at a receipt and it's saved as a PDF you can search.

And on a Mac or a Windows PC, Drive for desktop shows your files on the computer itself and keeps them up to date.

The 15 GB isn't only for Drive. Gmail and Google Photos draw on it too, so your emails and your phone's photo backup all count.

And when it's full, more than uploads stop. Google's help page says sending and receiving email can be affected, and you can't make new Docs. So a pile of holiday videos can jam up your inbox.

Stay over the limit for two years and Google says it may remove everything, after at least three months' warning.

Deleted something? It sits in the trash for 30 days, then it's gone for good.

Want a shared link to expire on Friday? That's only for eligible work or school accounts. Shared drives and client-side encryption are held back for some business plans as well.

And there's no desktop app for Linux. Google's help page says to use the website.

Start with the free 15 GB. Plenty of people never need more.

When you do, you're buying Google One, not "more Drive". 100 GB is $1.99 a month, and you can share it with up to five other people. The App Store also lists 200 GB at $2.99.

The one most people land on is 2 TB for $9.99 a month. It comes as Google AI Plus, so you also get higher limits in the Gemini app and Gemini in Gmail, wanted or not. Need more? Google AI Pro has 5 TB for $19.99.

Those are the prices on the US App Store. Google's own plans page says paying yearly saves up to 16%.

Whatever you buy is shared between Drive, Gmail and Photos, same as the free space. We'd go for 100 GB first and see how long it lasts.

Businesses buy Google Workspace, which is sold separately. Storage there is pooled, at 30 GB a person on Starter and 2 TB on Standard, and there's a 14-day trial.

Google Drive has 4.8 on the App Store from about 7.8 million ratings.

Most of the written reviews Apple shows are old, though. Seven of the ten go back more than three years.

What do people love? Getting at the same files from anywhere. One 2025 reviewer hops between Macs at home and PCs at work with no trouble. Another keeps a music teachers' group running out of colour-coded folders.

Some of it is plain sentimental. One family gathered years of videos of a dog they'd lost, and says watching them is a comfort.

And the complaints? An iPad user got fed up with files opening in the separate Docs and Sheets apps, then losing their place in the folder. In 2022 someone had videos stuck on "still processing" that never played.

Hacker News treats it like plumbing: lots of people's apps and side projects save into Drive. One Dropbox fan says Dropbox syncs more reliably once you're into hundreds of thousands of files. And a few say they wouldn't trust one Google account with their only copy of anything important.