Google Drive for web is getting some much needed improvements around downloading files and folders to your local PC, Mac or Chromebook. The update, which is in rapid release now and will be out to every by September 6th, will bring improved zip file downloading from your online content. The update will break up large downloads into 2GB zip files and will number them sequentially. The update means that downloading larger files or folders of content will be a bit easier to manage.
Specifically, Google outlines in the update notice the following changes will be coming to Drive:
Google Drive Download Improvements
- You can now compress and download Drive items into multiple 2GB zip files. Files have an improved name structure, for example: drive-download-20160516T125832Z.zip for the first file and drive-download-20160516T125832Z-2.zip for subsequent archives.
- Better Google Forms handling.
- Empty folders are now included in the zip.
As you can see, the update also improves how Google Forms are handled on Drive as well as the zip file handling.
The update is rolling out now to some users. I have received the update already on my Google Drive account and when downloading large folders, I get the automatic creation of sequentially numbered zip archives as expected. If you are not seeing the update yet, it will come to your account between now and September 6th.
