Category: Google Drive

Google Drive is a great service for storing your files and photos.  You get 15GB free and if you want or need more storage, you can get an additional 100GB for just $1.99 per month.  But let’s suppose for a minute you signed up for 100GB, use about 30GB and decide you want to cancel your subscription?  You are 15GB over the free limit so what happens to your files, photos and other things you have stored in Google Drive?  In short, not much.  It comes down to the service you are using tied to Google Drive but the data that you have there will remain there and not be deleted.  That’s the good news.  The not-so-good news is that your Gmail will start bouncing incoming messages.

Let’s deal with Google Drive itself first.  If you are over your quota, you won’t be able to upload new files.  Period.  Equally, syncing between your Google Drive folder on your PC or Mac will stop.  But, and critically, you can still create Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides files as they don’t consume any space anyway.  It isn’t necessarily a loophole in that the Google apps never used your quota anyway but it certainly is a way to keep on creating documents.  But keep in mind that the sync between your computer and your Google Drive stops so any Google Docs files created will only show up online in Chrome.  Those PDFs and Microsoft Office files? Yeah, no more uploading and syncing.

An option you would have – which I have done – is to convert your Microsoft Office files to Google.  This can be done via the web app or the Android app quite easily.  Just open up that Word document then go to File and convert it to Google Docs.  You can do the same for Excel files and PowerPoint files.  Once you have done your conversions, be sure to go to your Google Drive trash folder and empty it.  That will delete the Office files and reclaim your quota.  Keep in mind that reclaiming can take up to 24 hours to happen.

If you pay for Google Drive storage, there are some changes rolling out that you need to be aware of going forward.  From now on your Drive subscription will be managed within the Google Play Store like your other subscription apps.  Gone will be the separate purchasing and process for adding storage to your account.  Instead, for Android users, it will all roll up into the Play Store where you can manage all of your subscriptions (like Google Play Music) from one place.

The new process won’t effect anything you have to do as an end user.  Google is migrating accounts to Google Play Store and you should have received an email on this in December.  Once your account is converted over, you will see it as part of your subscriptions in the store.

While it shouldn’t come as a shock to most, it is official.  Starting January 1, 2017, Google Drive for desktop will no longer support Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003.  Given that Microsoft themselves no longer support these older versions of Windows themselves, it only makes sense that Google and other stop supporting it too.  The announcement came via the Google G Suite blog and was very clear that while the app is no longer supported, it should still work.  There won’t be any support or any further updates to the builds of Google Drive for these platforms.

Google has made a significant change in the background on Google Drive, bringing natural language processing to the search feature of the web-based part of the service.  Essentially what you can now do is search for things using natural language instead of specific file names.  This is the same technology that is used in Google Search to help you find things in a more natural language style.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fancy way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.” Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Drive NLP will get better with each query — so keep on searching. 😉

This new feature is likely to be a big time saver for those who have a lot of files in Drive.

Microsoft has announced that users of the new Outlook.com experience will soon have improved support for handling files from Google Drive and photos from Facebook.  The updates are going to be rolling out over the course of the next few weeks and it is a back end change so there is nothing you need to do.  Once you have the update, Google Drive files will be available to you from the Attach menu when creating an email.  Today when you want to do this you have to open a wholly separate tab.  That will no longer be the case and it will make attaching files out of Google Drive quicker and simpler.

Google has announced that a change is coming to Google Drive to help cut down on duplicate files.  The update is currently in Rapid release mode with a full roll out happening in a few weeks.  Once it does, if you have file that you are trying to upload to your Drive with the same user name, that older version will be made a part of your revision history and not a separate file.

A common use case for Google Drive users is to download a file from their Drive to modify it locally, and then to re-upload the new version. In the past, this would result in duplicate files (the original and the new one), and users would have trouble finding the latest version. That’s why we’re introducing a change in Drive to deduplicate files which were uploaded in this way.

Once launched, when users upload files that have the same filename as an existing file, they’ll be deduplicated, and the old file will be in revision history. This is so that if any mistakes are made, users can get back to the previous version. Similarly, uploaded folders will be merged with folders of the same name.