For most people, Google Drive brings to mind Google’s free online office suite—Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides—accessible via browser or mobile and packed with features.
These aren’t the only types of files Google Drive can handle. You can use the cloud storage Google provides as a comprehensive backup location for all your data—everything from PDFs to movies.
As a reminder, Google gives you 15GB of cloud storage space for free, which is shared between Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. Once you reach that limit, you can sign up for a Google One plan: Prices start at $2 per month for 100GB of room in the cloud, and go up from there.
Getting your files into Google Drive
You’ve got a couple of options for getting files into Google Drive. The first is to load up Google Drive on the web, click the New button (top left), then choose File upload or Folder upload. You can then select files or folders from your computer to copy to Google Drive (leaving the originals in place).
File and folder management in Google Drive on the web is pretty straightforward. Hover over files and folders to see options for renaming and sharing them, and click the three dots by each entry to find the Organize menu that lets you move something to another part of your Google Drive.
As well as the web interface, you’ve got the mobile and desktop apps. Install the Google Drive app for Android or iOS on your phone or tablet, and you can tap the + (plus) button in the lower right corner to find the upload option. You can then choose any file from your mobile device and sort them into folders.
If you go for the desktop apps for Windows or macOS, this is perhaps the easiest option of all, because files and folders from your computer will be backed up to Google Drive in the cloud automatically. Download the software, sign into your Google account, and you’ll be prompted to choose which folders get synced to Google Drive.
You can also choose to have files already in your Google Drive saved to your local computer for offline access. On the main screen, click the gear icon (top right), then choose Preferences to set all of this up: The My computer tab lets you choose folders to back up to the cloud, and the Google Drive tab lets you create a copy of your cloud storage locker on a local drive.
Viewing your files in Google Drive
When you send files to Google Drive, they’re not just backed up, they’re also accessible from inside the web interface and the mobile apps. On the web, you can view the most popular file formats inside your browser, without opening up another app. Try double-clicking on a PDF, for example, and you get a preview right inside Google Drive.
It works with video files too—double-click on a video and a miniplayer appears, with controls similar to YouTube. You can use the gear icon on the right of the playback window to change video options (including playback speed and quality, and the full screen icon (bottom right) to see the clip at full size.
So not only can you keep all of your files stored in the cloud, you can also get at them from just about any device that offers Google Drive access. While the audio, video, and image viewers aren’t the most sophisticated, they do their jobs well enough, and work fine for simple file viewing and management.
If Google Drive knows of an online or desktop app that can work with the file you’re previewing, you’ll see a link to this at the top of the screen. Click the arrow on the link to see other options: If you’re previewing a Word document, for example, you can convert it and open it up in Google Docs on the web to edit it in your browser.
Everything works in a similar way on mobile: Tap on most file types, like videos or documents, and they’ll open up inside the Google Drive app, or inside another app installed on your phone or tablet. If you need to use one of these files in other apps on your device, tap the three dots next to it and select Download.
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