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In the old world of the personal computer,
most applications came in the form of a disc.
To run an application, you would install it
onto your computer, where there you could execute it,
creating and saving files as needed to your hard drive.
The problem with this is obvious.
You may have multiple computers you
want to access your project from.
It's stuck on one, and if that computer isn't backed up,
you could easily end up losing your progress due to computer
failure.
Luckily, with the growth of the internet,
most of these applications, which
were traditionally offline, have been moving online
as web applications.
With this improvement, we can easily
access these apps from any computer
and not have to worry about keeping our data in sync.
However, with this evolution, we've
shifted a lot of responsibility onto the developer
of these websites to properly store user data,
keep backups, and facilitate sharing properly.
As you can imagine, this is no small task.
This is where Google Drive comes in.
Google Drive can be thought of as a user's personal hard drive
in the cloud.
What does that mean exactly?
Well, let me tell you.
Drive is built to be the place where you store,
share, and collaborate on personal files
across multiple desktops or mobile devices.
And it's all stored on Google's infrastructure,
ensuring your data is safe, secure, and always backed up.
Here's where it starts to get interesting.
See, Google recently created a Drive API,
which allows developers to easily store and retrieve data
from a customer's Google Drive, their personal hard drive
in the cloud.
This data could be anything, a document, image, video, song,
or even save game data recording how far you
got in your latest dungeon raid.
All this data can be saved using Google's infrastructure, which
will take care of backups, scale with your application,
and make it super simple to sync across multiple devices.
This way, developers can focus more
on building great applications and leave the cloud storage
to the experts by using the Google Drive API.