In our day-to-day tasks, we use various useful files and documents. While we store code in GitHub or GitLab, we often don’t back up other important files. This poses a risk of losing non-regenerative documents and files in the event of a hardware failure on our laptops, especially if we don’t sync them to any cloud or secondary location.
Google Drive offers a secure solution called Google Drive for Desktop, which provides 15GB of free space. This can help to overcome this challenge by allowing us to back up and sync our files to Google Drive automatically.
What is Google Drive for desktops?
Google Drive for Desktop is an application that lets you access and manage your Google Drive files directly from your computer. It creates a virtual drive on your system where you can view, open, and manage your Google Drive files just like any other file. Any changes you make are automatically synced with your Google Drive, ensuring everything stays up to date across all your devices. This tool is useful for backing up and syncing files between your computer and Google Drive without a web browser.
Use Google Drive for desktop
To easily manage and share content across all your devices and the cloud, use Google’s desktop sync client: Drive for Desktop. With Drive for Desktop, you can find your Drive files and folders on your computer using Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder. If you edit, delete, or move a file in the cloud, the same change occurs on your computer and devices, and vice versa. This ensures your files are always up to date and accessible from any device.
Benefits
You can use Drive for desktop to:
- Open files stored on the Cloud directly on your computer.
- Find and organize your files in your computer’s file system without using storage space.
- Sync folders from your computer to Google Drive.
- When you sync, your files download from the cloud and upload from your computer’s hard drive.
- After you sync, your computer’s files match those in the cloud.
- Your files stay up-to-date and accessible, any change you make applies across devices.
Save files and folders for offline use. This includes files from shared drives.
Collaborate on Microsoft Office files in real time.- If you use Outlook on Windows with a work or school account, send and save files with Microsoft Outlook.
- Before proceeding, you’ll need a Google account. You can create one using your work email.
Before proceeding, you’ll need a Google account. You can create one using your work email.
Create a Google account with your work email
- Go to https://google.com/accounts/NewAccount in your Web browser.
- Fill in First Name and Last Name fields
- Click “Use my current email address instead” as indicated below, we will not add personal accounts to Google Accounts.
- Type your company’s email address in the “Your current email address:” field.
- Type in a password for your Google account. This must be at least eight characters in length and should include a mixture of letters and numbers. Re-enter this password in the “Re-enter password:” field.
- Follow the verification process
- Click the “I accept. Create my account” button at the bottom of the page to create your Google account with a company email address.
- Log in to your company email. Open the email from Google regarding your new account. Click the confirmation link in the email to activate your Google account and complete the process with your company’s email address.
- Bingo! You now have a Google account with your work email address.
Install & set up Drive for desktop
Windows
- Download Drive for desktop: https://dl.google.com/drive-file-stream/GoogleDriveSetup.exe
- Open “GoogleDriveSetup.exe.”
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
MAC
- Download Drive for desktop: https://dl.google.com/drive-file-stream/GoogleDrive.dmg
- Open “GoogleDrive.dmg.”
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
Ubuntu
- Go to Settings > Online Accounts
- Select Google
- Signing to Google Account
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
Using Drive for Desktop
You will see Drive as a separate folder in your file system, which you can use to store non-regenerative files and documents to keep them protected.
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