Sync Options For Google Drive And Mac

Google drive for mac ending. Google Drive on PC/Mac is dead, long live Backup and Sync. It'll be replaced by the new, more capable app on March 12th, 2018. If you use Google Drive and/or Photos on PC and Mac, beware that both of those apps are being eliminated starting December 11th, 2017 and shut off completely in March of next year. Don't mourn their loss too much, though. Google will end support on December 11th. The aging Google Drive app for desktop is officially deprecated as of today, Google announced in a blog post. Support will be cut off on December 11th and the app will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018. Users who are still running the Drive app will start seeing notifications in October. Late last year Google announced that Google Drive for Mac will end. The company stopped supporting it on December 11, 2017 and it will shut down completely on May 12, 2018. It’s being replaced with a new app called Backup and Sync. Update: A previous version of this article stated that the end date was March 12, 2018.

1:28 Google's new replaces both the company's Drive and Photos desktop apps for Windows PCs and Macs. You can use the app to back up the contents of your entire computer -- or just selected folders. Set up Backup and Sync First, download the app. You'll end up with the same app either way. Next, launch the app, sign into your Google account and select which folders you'd like to continuously back up to Google Drive.

For photos, you have two options: High quality or Original quality. High quality will compress photos larger than 16 megapixels and videos with a resolution higher than 1080p but these compressed files will not count against your data cap. Google Drive provides 15GB for free but after that, you'll need to pay.

You can get (about £15 or AU$25), or 1TB for $99.99 a year (about £75 or AU$125). Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET There's also a checkbox to Upload photos and videos to Google Photos. Use this option if you want all of the photos you have stored on your computer to show up on Google Photos. I left this unchecked, because I already have the Google Photos mobile app backing up every photo I take on my and don't want all of the old photos on my Mac jamming up my Google Photos feed. I just want my Mac's photos safely backed up to Google Drive and don't feel the need to be able to browse through them on Google Photos. Next, click the OK button and Backup and Sync will start uploading. Sync can be a two-way street Backup and Sync not only syncs folders on your computer to Google Drive.

It also can sync folders you have in Drive to your computer, so you can access them when you're offline. You can choose to download and sync your entire, top-level My Drive folder on Google Drive, or you can select specific folders.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET Set a delete rule After setting up Backup and Sync and completing your initial uploads and downloads, when you return to the app and open Preferences, you'll see an area labeled Removing items. Here you can choose how Drive reacts when you delete a file on your computer.

To enable selective subfolder syncing, click on the three-dot menu in the Google Drive app’s interface, go to Preferences > Sync Options. From here, select the Sync only these folders option, and choose which folders and subfolders you want or do not want to sync locally to your Windows PC or Mac. Technically, it is possible to sync/backup your external drive to Google Drive via the native app -- but that method has its limitations. For one, you lose your file/folder structure because you'd have to place the Google Drive sync folder inside your external drive. Insync has a better way. The right way.

It's set up to ask you if you also want to delete it everywhere, meaning from Drive, too, but you can also set it to delete files from Drive without asking first or to keep files there when you delete them from your computer. New Computers folder on Google Drive The folders you selected for Backup and Sync will show up in a new Computers folder on Google Drive. You'll see any computers on which you have Backup and Sync running listed in this folder. Click on a computer and then you'll see your hierarchy of folders that you choose to back up. Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET Google must be constantly monitoring your folders, because changes to files show up immediately. When I made a change to a file on my Mac, the synced file on Google Drive already showed the change by the time I clicked over to check.

Not a restore tool I'll leave you with a caveat: Backup and Sync is great tool for keeping safe backups of your important files in the cloud, but it is not a replacement for a restore tool. If your computer crashes, you will not be able to use Backup and Sync to restore your OS.

With Google Drive, you can store all your files in the cloud, including photos, Microsoft ® Word ® documents, Excel ® spreadsheets, and more. You can also make changes to a Word file using Google Docs, or convert your Word files to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides. You can open your files from your computer’s Drive folder on the desktop or from your browser.