Using Your Gmail Account as a 2.6GB Virtual Drive

GMail Drive is a nifty piece of software that lets you use the voluminous space Google offers through its email service as a virtual file system. Using GMail Drive is simple, and it walks and talks just like a hard drive on your computer. You may retire your USB thumb drive, opting for this impressive online alternative.

Installing GMail Drive

GMail Drive is currently in version 1.08, and it can be downloaded here. Installation of GMail Drive is a cinch. Simply download the zip file and unzip it to a directory. From there, launch the installer. Double-click the My Computer icon. You should now see a new drive icon named GMail Drive, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Next, right-click the GMail Drive icon and choose the Login As option from the context menu (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

You are then asked to provide a user name and password. Go ahead and provide your Gmail user name and password.

Here, you can also check the Auto Login option (shown in Figure 3) if you want GMail Drive to automatically log you into your Gmail account.

Figure 3

Clicking the More button will reveal additional information that you can provide if, for example, you have to go through a proxy to get things working (see Figure 4).

Figure 4

Next, double-click the GMail Drive icon. Doing so, you should see a progress screen like the one shown in Figure 5, which indicates the progress of your computer interfacing with your Gmail account through the GMail Drive application.

Figure 5

When the login process has completed, you should see a folder representation view of the contents of your GMail Drive (see Figure 6). You can treat this drive just as any other hard drive/thumb drive on your computer. For example, you can drag and drop files to the GMail Drive, delete from the drive, copy to the drive, and so on.

Figure 6

Accessing GMail Drive Files While On the Road

Suppose that you’re working on a computer that is not yours, but you want access to the files that you have stored on your GMail Drive. Fortunately, you don’t have to install the GMail Drive software on a remote computer simply to access your files. As you recall, the backing store of your GMail Drive files is your email account. Accordingly, to access your files, you can go to your Gmail account via your Internet browser. From there, you can see and access all the files you have stored on your GMail Drive. Files you have stores will be prefixed with the GMALFS prefix, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7

GMail Drive Limitations

As of version 1.08 of GMail Drive, Gmail limited the size of files that you can attach to 10 MB. Also files stored on the GMail Drive must have a total filename size of fewer than 40 characters.