If you are using Google Drive and you want to synchronize the files between your computer and Google Drive, there are two different programs that Google offers to do it. There is Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync. We are going to look at both of them, we are Going to talk about the differences. right now I'm only running Backup and Sync, so if you look at my file structure on the left-hand side, you get a folder that says Google Drive and has the little Google Drive logo on it. And when you left-click on that, it will show you the contents of your Google Drive. If you look at the file path, it puts it under your name because that's where your files are in windows, and then Google Drive, and I have gone down one more folder, so let me go back.
These are the three main folders that I have in the root directory of my Google Drive. And you get Backup and Sync by, I'll go over to my browser on the right-hand side, and when you're logged into Google Drive on the web, if you just left-click on the gear icon, you'll see an option that says, Download Backup and Sync. Mine says Drive File Stream, because this is a business account. But if you have a business, you can do either, and we're Going to spend most of our time in Backup and Sync.
A lot of the functionality is the same. and you'll download Backup and Sync, install it on your computer, and then a window will come up for some settings, and we'll take a look at those right now. This is a window that you'll see when you're installing Backup and Sync. And one of the first options that it asks you about is something interesting. So it wants to know if you want to sync any of your existing folders into Google Drive.
So let's look at Google Drive, and see what that did. So on the left-hand side, if we go down, because I chose this option to sync some of these folders, I have something that's called Computers. And if I left-click on this, I've only done this on this one PC, so it has my PC, and it's taken all of these folders and also uploaded those to Google Drive. So if I were to lose this laptop tomorrow, everything would be backed up. And as I use it, it's automatically synced, so these files are up-to-date. I'm going to go over on the left-hand side and look at my actual files. I'll right-click on the folder documents, that's one of them that is synced, and I'm going to open that in a new window. So you can right-click on these files, and you'll see the extra option that says, Google Drive in this menu. So Google Drive knows this is synced and it's giving you some extra capabilities with the file so you can share it from this menu. You can just copy the link to the keyboard so you can send someone that way or you can view it on the web. So if I left-click on a view on the web, my browser is Going to bring me to a view of this file.
Now, it is giving you an option up here to open it. So there must be some sort of third party app recognition in this case. So sometimes you will see this, sometimes you won't. But you want to go into Google Drive to locally work with your files. They're saved there. So let's go back to the Backup and Sync window, and you can control which of these folders gets synced. So if I left-click on the choose folder, I could change them. And the next option is just saying, yes, I do want to keep things synchronized. So if I delete something from my computer, delete it from Google Drive. Backup and Sync also want to grab your photos. It will put them in Google Photos.
If you check this, and I like to put my photos somewhere else. I keep the two separated. And it's really outside of Google Drive, they go into Google Photos. Let's go to the next option, Google Drive. So this is saying, this is going the other direction. So, everything is already in Google Drive, what do you want it to sync onto this computer? So you could just say, sync everything. So what I did was, I didn't want all my files on this computer, 'cause you see, I have 20 gigs of files. So what you can do is left-click on these arrows and drill down and just uncheck some things that you don't want. So I tried to go into these and I just unchecked some of the larger ones.
You won't be able to tell when we're going through the course, but you can customize this as much as you want, or you can just sync everything. So this doesn't affect what's in Google Drive, this affects what comes down onto your computer. And then there are some more settings. So it shows here where you can upgrade your storage. If you have a personal Google Drive account, there's less storage. You can subscribe to what's called Google One to upgrade it, to pay for more. Depending on what you do, you may never run into that, or it may be a consideration if you're working with large video files like I do. And I would suggest leaving on the option to open up Backup and Sync when you start.
That way it synchronizes your latest activity. And this is just asking if it wants to show you these two items. So let's drill down and change this to show details. The right-click menu functionality it was talking about is adding the Google Drive. I would not uncheck that. And then in some other views, you might see some icons that indicate whether or not the folders are synced. You can just leave that on as well. I'm not seeing them in this view. But here's an example of one if you see that. Green indicates that that drive is synced. All right, we're done looking at the settings. Let's come look at the Google Drive folder that it made.
And one more little quirk to keep in mind, if you want to work with the drive sheets and docs files, which are the built-in office programs in Google Drive, but you work offline, you'll want to grab a copy of the Chrome extension called Google Docs Offline. You need to turn that on, and then you can edit things. This is a Google doc file on the left. If I double-clicked on that and I wasn't online, Google Chrome wouldn't know what to do with it. But if you install this extension, you can edit it like anything else. If you have a computer that's always plugged in to the Internet or always on WiFi, this won't make any difference. You'll never need it, you won't notice. But if you do travel a lot and you don't always have the Internet, well, install this and then you won't have to worry about it. We're Going to spend some time talking about how to use Drive File Stream. So I uninstalled Backup and Sync and I re-installed Drive File Stream. And I got that from going to the gear icon and doing Get Drive File Stream.
So this is only available if you're using a business account. If you know you're Going to stay on a personal account, don't worry about it, skip to the next video. But if you want to see the differences, we're Going to spend a little bit of time talking about those. Well, the first thing that you'll notice is when you come over to the file explorer in the left-hand side, the folder that says Google Drive, and it has a little icon of drive is gone. And now we have Google Drive File Stream. But if you look at the end of the name, it says the G drive. So what this has done it has mapped Google Drive as if it's its own drive and not just a folder within your directory structure. If I come down to this PC and I expand that as well, it's Going to be down at the bottom, and it gives you a default of G, but you can change that. We'll look at that in a minute. But we'll left-click on this, and right away, you see a difference. If I left-click on Shared Drives, we'd be back in familiar territory, but we'll go back one. And because I'm on the second of three business plans, I can also look at my shared drives.
This contains the files that I've put in my shared drives, but these are basically files that I share with team members. But we'll go back to my map G drive, and we'll go in My Drive. And from here it looks pretty familiar. So it's mapped. You can double-click on the folders and work with them like you're just in Windows. We'll left-click into the same place, and we'll right-click on this document that we were looking at before, and we have some of the same options so we can open it with Google Drive. So that'll just bring you to the web interface, open the file up, and copy the link to share it, or you can share it through Google Drive. So you will get some expanded options on how to share it, or you could make this available offline. So, Drive File Stream is fundamentally different in one way, and one way that you will notice if you're often without Internet connection and another way that you might not notice.
If you're always connected is that all of the files are online only unless you select otherwise. So what you are seeing right now here in this file explorer isn't actually saved on my computer, but when you see me navigate through it, it goes fast enough as you probably won't notice. And you can choose to selectively sync items if you want. So it defaults to being off your computer instead of on. So let's go down and look at the settings, we'll right-click on Drive File Stream. This interface is a little bit different, it's showing me my activity. You can just click on this folder here to open up the file explorer. But let's left-click on the gear icon and see some of the settings.
We'll go down to Preferences, and there's a lot less here. So it's still asking if you should launch it on startup. I would always say, yes, there's a risk that you'll forget about it and things won't be synchronized. Real-time presence in Microsoft Office. So this allows you when you're using Office Files through Drive, to still see if other people are editing them and work with them in real-time, Change the default drive letter here, I just left mine at G. But if you already have a Drive mapped for something and you're at work, you can change it to another letter. You'll notice there is no option here to sync your photos which is kind of consistent with this being more of a business product, right? This is deployed at a company, they probably don't want you filling up your hard drive with your photos. And those are the main differences.
One wants to grab most of your files and maybe synchronize what you have on your computer, that's Backup and Sync, and Drive File Stream is lighter-weight and it doesn't even sync the files unless you tell it to. But we'll go down and look at this text file. And this one if you right-click on it and go to Drive File Stream, you have the option to make that available offline. So you would have to left-click that, it would download the file onto your computer. And then you could open that up if you didn't have an Internet connection.
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