The ‘Team Drives’ folder only has folders that your organisation shares with you. You will notice another folder called ‘Team Drives’ Team Drives You can keep this folder private or you can choose to share it with other members of your organisation, or you can use it to share documents publicly on the Internet.

In your Google Drive will be a folder called “My Drive” If you click on it it will open up like a normal hard drive and you will see something like this: The Google Drive will now appear on your desktop something like this: Google Drive syncing is through some software called G-suite.) This is free to non-profit organisations but if you are a commercial organisation you will need to subscribe to it. (To use Google Drive you must be part of an organisation. Install the app and enter your Google G-suite username and password. Download the Google ‘Drive File Stream’ App from here:Ģ.Of course, you could use these tools any way you want but that’s the way I have found myself using them. Files that I want to share with myself – Dropbox. Files that I want to share with other people – Google Drive. I find it really useful to have this distinction in my head. I use dropbox to share files that I am working on across my own personal computers.

We use Google Drive to share documents across our organisation. Dropbox syncs the 2 folders completely, so they are available offline as well. Last week our internet was down, and I went to access a file in my Google Drive, and I could see it, but not access it without a web connection. Each have their advantage, and I use both.Īnother big point of difference is that Google Drive requires an active internet connection. It feels like a foreign hard drive that is out there in the cloud and you happen to have access to it from your computer. It’s more like copying the file to a thumb drive.īecause of this difference in the way they behave, Dropbox feels like it’s a folder on your computer like any other folder, it just happens to be shared with others. (The file is not copied, it is moved.) But when you drag a file into your Google Drive it doesn’t move the file, it creates a copy of the file. When you move a file into dropbox the file is moved into dropbox, like you would expect if you were moving a file into a different folder. Google Drive is similar but different to dropbox. It looks like a regular hard drive and the contents of the folder are automatically available to anyone else who has access to the same Google Drive. You can mount a ‘Google Drive’ onto you Mac, it’s a neat cloud based storage solution from Google.

Google drive mac os 10.10.5