How to move Google Drive files to an external hard drive?
March 6, 2018 9:24 AM   Subscribe

I'm running out of hard disk space. How can I move some large Google Drive files to a destination that's not my computer?

I must be missing something. I just ran a disk space utility, and can see that my Google Drive files are taking up a crapton of space on my C: drive. When I go to My Google Drive and select 700 photo and video files that I want to move out of there, there is no option to send them to my external drive. The only option is to download the GD zipped files, or move them without zipping, to Computer - My Computer. I have almost no free space left on C: drive, so there's no room to temporarily park these on the hard drive and then move them to my external drive.

I also have a Wetransfer Plus account, but I'm not sure how to connect other cloud accounts so that Google Drive sees them. Is there a workaround?
posted by cartoonella to Technology (8 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I am a bit confused, as Google Drive is usually a cloud-based service (i.e., you store files up in the cloud so they're NOT on your computer).

Have you downloaded/synced all your files in Google Drive down to your desktop?
posted by kuanes at 9:31 AM on March 6, 2018 [2 favorites]


You need to disable sync for certain folders or filetypes with the Drive app or the 'Backup and Sync' app, whichever you have. Then they won't be copied to your hard drive. Deleting them isn't the right thing in this case.
posted by GuyZero at 9:34 AM on March 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: That makes sense, just one more thing--I'm using a PC now, where is the Backup and Sync option? If it's easier to use an app, I'll download Backup and Sync on my iPad...
posted by cartoonella at 9:48 AM on March 6, 2018


Response by poster: Kuanes, I didn't do the downloading, but yes, my Google Drive was set to load everything to my hard drive. Until recently that was the only option, apparently, before the sync and backup feature. I didn't know this, so for months I've been blithely smooshing all of my large files to Google Drive, thinking I was freeing up hard drive space, when that was just making it worse.

Google Drive is mainly a sync program I think. I thought the storage redundancy was great, except my hard drive wasn't where I wanted that to happen. :P

Does anyone know: can I delete my LOCAL Google Drive files without removing them from the Google Drive cloud at the same time?
posted by cartoonella at 10:23 AM on March 6, 2018


In the client software that runs on your PC, you can "disconnect" your account. This will turn off sync and let you do whatever you want with the local files.
You can also tell the software to store the locally synced files somewhere else, if you want it to use a different drive. On my PC, I sync Google Drive to my D:\ drive easily.
posted by jozxyqk at 10:38 AM on March 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thank you, Jozxyqk, I'll try that!

Playing around just now, I figured out another sequence to use in case it can help someone else:

Transferring files from My Google Drive to an external drive (on Windows PC)
- Open Windows Start menu
- Type Backup and Sync from Google
- In the [YourComputerName] > Google Drive > folder, choose folder to transfer
- Drag and drop it to your external drive icon

You can keep the two copies, one on the external drive and one in the Google cloud, or you can delete the original from Google Drive to free up hard disk space.
posted by cartoonella at 10:42 AM on March 6, 2018


Inside the Backup and Sync App, you should be able to select which folders/files (from your Google Drive) to sync to your hard drive. That will let you delete them from your hard drive while keeping them on Google Drive. One of the primary uses of Google Drive is to store files that you don't have on your hard drive, so you definitely don't have to remove them from Google Drive to recover the hard disk space.

For the old Google Drive client, the steps were like this:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3057217/google-apps/how-to-use-google-drives-selective-sync.html

The new client is similar, see the thrid photo here:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/google-backup-and-sync-app-merges-the-drive-and-photos-sync-apps/
posted by yuwtze at 10:57 AM on March 6, 2018 [2 favorites]


Try google take out - it can export anything google to a zip file download.

It is here but as google has to be google you have to log in to read about it .

You can read about it on wikipd here
posted by epjr at 9:08 AM on March 7, 2018


« Older Looking for a book   |   Good stuff on Netflix that might look like it's... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.