Would you like to access Google Drive directly from your computer without having to open up your browser?
Well, in this video I'm going to show you how to set up Google Drive for desktop, step by step and show you how to adjust your settings so you can get the most out of this tool.
Now, the easiest way to get started is to go into your Google Drive account. You can either go to drive.google.com or if you're in another Google app for example, you can come up here and select Drive from your Google Apps menu.
Once you're here within your drive account, we want to select that gear icon and don't select settings. We want to come down here and select Get Drive for desktop.
Now this is actually just going to open up a new tab within your browser, but this is where we have the opportunity to download the Drive app for our desktop.
We're going to go ahead and select that button. It's going to download it here. We can see it happening here within our browser, and it's going to download this executable file. We can either click on this here to launch it, or you can go to your downloads folder on your computer To open this up.
I'm going to click it here, and then we're going to be provided with another prompt. Do we want to go ahead and install Google Drive?
Now we have the choice to add a shortcut to our desktop to Google Drive. You may find that helpful. That's really down to personal preference. And if we'd like to add shortcuts to docs, sheets and slides.
Now I try to minimize my own shortcuts on my desktop. I like to access things directly from my task bar or from my file folder system. So I'm going to choose to uncheck these. You can choose otherwise.
And then I'm going to select Install. Now it may take a few moments to install. That was rather quick. I'm going to go ahead and select Launch.
We are then presented with a welcome screen, and these are some of the key benefits of using Drive for desktop. Not only can we safely store our files within Drive, but we can open those drive files within applications on our computer. We can automatically keep things up to date. And yes, you can back up your photos to Google Photos as well.
Let's go ahead and select get started.
Next, we will need to sign into our Drive account. So I'm going to go ahead and select sign in. This is going to bring me back to my browser so I can select the correct account. I'm going to make sure to yes, sign in.
And now that we've successfully logged in to our drive account, we are brought back to our drive for desktop menu and we've got a few decisions to make.
So the first one here is to choose which folders to sync from our computer to drive. Now this is optional. You don't have to do this. In my example, it's given me three suggestions, my desktop documents and my downloads folder. And if I do want to sync this, if I do want to upload and sync it with my drive account, I can simply select that checkbox and it'll show me the size of those documents or the size of those folders as well.
But if I want to choose another folder, I can come down here and choose add folder. But we don't have to do this right now either. We can always come back and sync other folders. So I'm going to say Skip in this case.
Next, it just gives us a quick explainer between the difference between syncing with drive and backing up to photos. So sync with Drive, and this is where we're going to focus. Most of our attention automatically will sync our edits, whether we edit that online within our drive account, within our browser, or if we edit those files here within our computer.
But when it comes to backing up to photos, it is going to treat edits as new files. So it won't be syncing those files together, it's going to upload or backup in one direction. I'm going to go ahead and say Got it at this case. And then we're going to select Skip one more time.
And lastly, within this menu, it is telling me that my drive files are just a click away within File Explorer. So here it's telling me that I have 22 files and six folders in my drive. This is referring to my Google Drive. And here a little bit of an icon showing the relationship between the two. And yes, it's going to give me that Google Drive icon as well.
This is more of an explainer just to reassure me what I'm going to see when I open up File Explorer. I'm going to select next.
And then the very last thing that Drive wants to make sure we understand is that our drive files, meaning the files that we have uploaded to Google Drive, will only be available when we have an internet connection. If we want to make those files available offline, we will need to right click on the file or the folder and then choose make available offline. And I'll show you how to do that with a real file in just a moment.
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So let's go ahead and select Open Drive.
And now we are brought to our Google Drive dialogue here within my desktop. Now, there's not an awful lot going on just yet. It me, which account I've signed in for. It shows me my total storage available with my drive account. It's showing my activity, which of course, because we just got started, there's nothing much to show here. Everything is up to date and under notifications, we really don't have any new notifications here as well.
Now we're going to come back here and adjust our settings in a moment, but where we really want to pay attention is within our File Explorer account.
So here I am within File Explorer being able to access all of the files and folders here within my computer. And down near the bottom, you can see under the section this pc, we have a new area called Google Drive.
If we click on that, we will now have access to both MyDrive account and also other computers. Now we have access to all of these same files, all of the same files that I have within my drive account. If here on the right hand side, I'm just going to quickly open up my online drive account. And here if you do just sort of a quick glance, bonus one-on-one coaching call is over here. My statement of work version four is listed over here as well.
Everything is perfectly in sync. I can access any of these folders, I can access any of these files without having to go to my browser.
But of course, that's just one of the benefits. Not only do I not have to start my work within Drive, but now I can also drag files here into this drive account as well.
So for example, here under downloads, I've got this image called Scott Coaching. I'm just going to click and drag it and I'm going to move it into my drive account. So if we click on my drive here, you can see that I now have this Scott Coaching image. Here's the image itself, and I've brought it into my drive account.
Now here on the right hand side, we have my browser version of Google Drive. Now you may need to refresh your screen, but perfect. Here it is. It's been synced without me having to upload it manually. All I did was drive it into this folder and now I have access to this exact same file online. So no matter where I go, no matter where I access Google Drive or on some other device, I have access to it here as well.
But what if I make a change over here? So let's say for example, I no longer need this particular file, I'm just going to right click it and I'm going to say move it to trash.
So it's been removed here from my online Google Drive account, and it may take a few seconds here for this to register over here on our computers, but after just a few seconds, we can now see that that file has been removed. It no longer exists in either place because both of these files are perfectly in sync.
Now, syncing individual files by dragging files in - Or out of your Google Drive account can be helpful. There's probably a good chance that you already have an entire folder or folders that you would like to back up to Google Drive.
In this case, I'm going to click on my desktop account, and I've got a folder here called Temporary Files. These are things that I want to be able to access on any of my devices that have Google Drive installed.
If I go ahead and right click on this option here, I may have to come all the way down to show more options. But here with Google Drive for desktop installed, you can see that we have the option to sync or back up this folder. I'm going to go ahead and select that option here.
Now, my first option here is whether I want to sync this with Google Drive or back up to Google Photos. Yes, you can back up any of your photos or videos directly from your computer, but remember only photos and videos, and it will give you a helpful warning here as well.
In my case, I only want to sync it with Google Drive, so I'm going to go ahead and select Done. And now within my Google Drive preferences, it will show me that these temporary files are going to be synced with my Google Drive account.
Now, this actually hasn't been saved yet.
We're going to need to come down here and hit that save button. But if we want, we can also go and choose other folders from our computer. And this may make it a little bit easier as it brings it up in this dialogue, and we can go ahead and select those folders rather than right clicking. As I showed in this initial step here, I'm going to go ahead and hit save in this case. And now going forward, this folder will automatically be synced with my drive account.
Now that you know the basics of syncing and uploading and sharing files between your desktop and Google Drive, where do we go to change our preferences or edit additional settings? Well, down here within your desktop task bar, you may need to reveal the other applications that you have installed. And because Google Drive for desktop is the most recent here you can see it here, I'm going to click on that and we're going to return to this menu that we saw shortly after we downloaded this application.
Here. It's going to show me an activity of all of the files, which it has synced, and if there happens to be any notifications. But where we want to pay attention to is the gear icon. By selecting this and then select preferences, we will return to the screen or return to the dialogue, which we just saw a moment ago.
So yes, we can continue to add folders that we would like to sync. But on the left hand side, you can also see that there are two different areas. One called my computer and another one called Google Drive.
The first one is folders from your computer. So just like we did, which folders we would like to sync. The next one called Google Drive folders from Drive gives us make a very important decision about how our files are synced together.
Now, by default, this first one called Stream Files is selected. This means that all of the drive files are only stored in the cloud, meaning that we are accessing those files from a virtual drive or folder from our computer. And yes, we can choose if there are specific things that we want to be made available offline.
The second option here is mirror files. This is where it stores all of your dry files in the cloud and on your computer. It'd almost be nice if they bolded or capitalized and on your computer. So yes, it's sort of like double storage. You can access files from the folder on your computer. And yes, all files are automatically available offline.
Here's one important note that it highlights for us as well, that streaming uses less hard drive space. And that should go without saying, because remember, there are only stored in the cloud.
They're visible, you can see them and you can launch them and access them from your desktop, but they are only stored online. So you can choose which is most suitable for you.
But let's quickly come back to this one here, choosing specific files and folders to make available offline. How exactly do we do that?
Let's jump back into my drive account here within my desktop computer. And let's say for this very first folder, I want this to be made available offline here on my computer. Not everything within this folder, but just this one at the top.
So once again, we're going to right click on the file or folder. We're going to come down here and select show more options. And here, under a number of different drive options we have available to us, we have the ability to change it to available offline.
Here you can see it says Offline access, and that will give us the ability to make this change if I select available offline. Now I can have access to everything in this folder, even if I don't have an internet connection.
And if you ever want to see a complete list of your offline files, we can come back down here, select Google Drive for desktop. Once again, we are going to select that gear icon. And here under preferences we can select offline files.
So here it's going to show me the total size of those offline files. I'm going to click on offline files. And there we see there's that exact same folder.
So if you have trouble forgetting or remembering which files or folders you've made available - Offline, you can always come here and make those changes.
Now, if you want to get even more out of your Google Drive experience, I encourage you to watch the video on the screen now. And if you have further questions, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
