Google launched the Google Drive or GDrive few says ago. Initially it was available for only selected countries but now its available all over the world. You can start using Google Drive right now by visiting https://drive.google.com/start.
Google Drive is just like its rival cloud storage and sync service, Dropbox. But there is one problem with Google Drive. All the files in Google Drive are stored online only. There is no offline sync like Dropbox. In fact, you have no access to Google Drive files if you are not connected to internet.
Google has realized this issue, and now you can access the files stored in your Google Drive even when you are offline. To do this, you must setup the Docs Offline feature.
To enable to ‘Docs Offline’ feature, go to your Google Drive, click on the settings button (gear button) in the top right corner and select Set up Docs offline.
On the next window, first ‘Allow offline docs’ and then install the Google Docs extension for Google Chrome to view your Google documents offline.
Once installed, you can type docs.google.com in your Google Chrome browser to access all the Google Drive files even if you have no internet access.
Check out the video below in which I enable Offline Docs for my Google Drive account:
The Docs Offline feature is great but its still under development, so it lacks some features right now. For instance,
• In Dropbox, you can open a file in your Dropbox folder and edit it without any internet access. The next time you are online, this file will be automatically synced. In Google Drive, it works fine except that you cannot edit any files that you created via Google Docs itself. You can open them only in ‘view only’ mode if you are offline.
• No way to open Google forms, drawings and presentations in offline mode.
• Currently you can use this feature only via Google Chrome.
I am sure that all these issues will be resolved once this feature is launched fully. So, start using Google Drive even when you are offline now!