Hi there, Jamie here today at Teachers Tech. Hope you're having a great day today. Today I want to show you how to install and set up Google Drive for desktop.
Now if you haven't used this before or haven't heard of this, this can save you a lot of time. What it does is puts a folder on your computer that directly connects to the cloud to your Google Drive so you don't have to open up your browser and log into Google Drive to access your files. It's always up to date on your computer.
The other thing I like about this if you're working in Microsoft too, if they're on your computer when you open up those files that maybe are stored in google drive they'll open up right away to the correct microsoft app if they're on your computer so today i'm going to go through installing and the setup of how to use google drive for desktop i'll put the link to this download page for google desktop here down below in the video description you can see it's either going to be for pc or mac i'm on my windows computer here today i'm going to go ahead and click the download it's a fairly quick download and then we'll start the install process i'm just going to go ahead and open it right from here and so we'll get ready for our install i'm just going to say yes to this and now at this point and add an application shortcut to your desktop you can have it there i'm going to say yes for this and install you can see it runs through very quickly to get it on your computer so once it gets to this point here we need to sign in with a browser so i'm going to go ahead and connect it to this account right here hit sign in and it's success so where is this going to show up well let me open up my explorer window here down below i'm going to go and just open this up and what i want to point out to you now is that we have this google drive here i'm going to go ahead and open up this google drive and then go to my drive and you can see all these files so where are these coming from i'm just going to change this window and do a little side by side here so this is my google drive online if you take a look at this folder here linking sheets and spreadsheets and google sheets this is over here if i open this up here you see these different ones if i open this up you see the same ones now there's some choices that you can be making between streaming and mirroring and I'm going to show you why you might want to choose either of those in a bit. But it's very easy to use this Google Drive for desktop because all you have to do now, anything I drag into here will automatically get synced with here. So then I can be logging in somewhere else on a different computer and I could just go and grab from my normal logging into the browser.
So let me show you how these things can sync now. so if i go ahead and you notice i have google drive up here because i have it in my quick access and i also have it down here it's the same thing just two different places to get it but let's say i was going to drag a picture out of here so right out of these pictures i'm going to go to camera roll if i go and take this here and i'm just going to drag it down into where it said my drive underneath google drive here so if then i'm going to go ahead and open it notice now that it's right here so if i go over to my browser and here it is so the same picture just got updated it's synced here so i can open up the picture here and it is also here now if i go and create a file from here so let's see if i was creating a google slides present presentation i could go ahead and make this and i'll just give this a little test name here and i'm going to go and just put a zero here so comes up right at the top of it just like this and so at this point if i go back to my google drive you're going to see that this should be in my google drive over here i'll just give it a quick refresh here it is zero test now over here and sometimes it can take a moment or so but before the syncing is going in but even if i just go in and then back out uh you can see here it is zero test and if i go ahead and open it from here it opens in uh you can see it open in the browser over here because that's what it was created in now if i was creating something like microsoft word so i have a microsoft word file that i would save into here if i go to my google drive here you can see that it is right here and the issue would be if you want to keep on working in microsoft word from here If I go ahead and open, I'm not going to get it to Microsoft Word. This is just going to be converting it into using Google Docs. But if I open it over here now, if it's saved, this is going to be saved in Google Drive. It's still going to open the Microsoft app on my computer.
So thinking about you can just drag things over into the folders. If I go ahead and make a folder, if I was making a folder over here. So if I go just go new folder and you can see I'll just call this test like this.
And I'm going to go back over here. uh to my google drive and i'll just do a quick refresh here is that folder and then i can be moving things over here and it's going to reflect over on this one so if i go to test over here now sometimes it takes a second i'll just go back out again and in oops click the wrong one go back and you can see there it is right now so it just took a few seconds to sync over and now i moved it over here but is reflecting over here so i hope this helps you understand how the files are being moved around how you can store you know i gave the example of microsoft but it can be other files too if you're using photoshop and you needed to open up a photoshop file it could be saved in here and it will just open up photoshop to do that so let me go over now some of the settings that you we can be using in this google drive for desktop top app such as mirroring versing versus the streaming to access the settings on the google drive app just go down to the bottom of the computer bottom right hand corner you can see here is the google drive app i'm going to open this up this shows me the activity of the things that i was just showing you from creating or moving the files and how everything is syncing there are notifications to let you know in this case you can see this can't the action couldn't be completed and it will just have different notifications there where i want to go to though is this right here so i'm going to hit this little gear to go to preferences inside preferences you can go ahead and add more files to or folders to backup on your computer so this is a great feature if you have important files you just want to make sure that you have a place you're backing up to the cloud that's not automatically in that my drive that folder that was syncing with google drive that was automatically added at the beginning so if i go add a folder and let's say something in my documents here and let's for example camtasia all my different videos that i make using camtasia i want to make sure that these are saved to the cloud i could go ahead and select this and this will be synced with google drive if it was going to be images and videos well then i would probably look at doing backup to google photos you have a choice there and then all you have to do is hit done at this point and then it's going to sync so depending on how much time or how many files or how big it is it could take some time to sync everything back and forth now what i want to point out is if we go to google drive here when we originally set up google drive it's under stream files and this is going to save space on your computer because when you go ahead and select stream files store all of my my drive files in the cloud only access files from the virtual drive on your computer now if you wanted them actually saved on your computer also we could put mirroring the mirror files here the one thing to know when you do choose mirror files this is going to take up more room on your computer because they are stored there but if you weren't online you would still be able to access those files from here because they're saved on your computer so you choose what one would work best for you if you're worried about not having enough space on your computer if not you could go ahead and mirror the other things i just want to point out right up here notice that i can add another account right through this point so if you did want a second gmail account google drive account you can go ahead and do that if i go to the gear again you're going to see a few different options so this is where i can disconnect the account that i'm set up with you can see this is the one that i started and logged in with if this is a good feature to have on if you are using microsoft word you can see if someone else is editing a shared microsoft office file so if you check that that would be on here so the other thing with this one do you want the letter g as your google drive i kind of always leave it the same but if you wanted a different letter maybe you're using the g drive as something else you can go ahead and select it from right here there's some other uh the other different settings that you can go through and check out here to kind of get everything just the way that you want so go back to level if there's anything to add to backup right through here so i hope you like this little kind of demo of setting up how to install the google drive for desktop app and kind of how it works with the streaming or maybe you want to choose mirroring i find this saves me a lot of time to have this on my computer i have it on my uh mac also then i can just be working back and forth from my computer without having to go to the web and open up google drive and logging in there each time so let me know if this was if there's any problems with anything down below in the descriptions and what else you're wanting to look at i did have a different video about using google drive with just the online i'll put a link to that one down below and in the card above thanks for watching this time on teachers tech i'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials