Tag: Google Drive

Google Backup and Sync, the desktop app that synchronizes files with your Google Drive, has an update rolling out that brings a lot of feature improvements and fixes.  The new build is version 3.38.7642.3857 for both Windows and MacOS.  Given that updates to the app are done in the background, it is possible that you have already received this new update.

Google has laid out all of the changes in this update in the release notes but here are the highlights:

• You can now switch between syncing all files and folders versus photos and videos only. In Backup and Sync Preferences, click Change in the “My Computer” section to choose which files sync.
• You can now ignore files by extension. In the “My Computer” section of Backup and Sync Preferences, click ChangeAdvanced settings, and then enter the file extensions to ignore. Note that this applies only to directories on your computer, not to the “My Drive” folder.
• You can now right-click any folder and select Sync this folder to start syncing that folder to Google Drive.
• Users are now notified when Backup and Sync can’t convert photos to high quality.
• Fixed an issue where multiple copies of the executable were being created in Windows.
• Fixed an issue where quitting Backup and Sync was taking a long time.
• More bug fixes and performance improvements.

As you can see, it is an extensive list that addresses several issues with the app for both Windows and Mac users.

Google has rolled out an update to Google Drive that brings a new, Machine Learning-backed Quick Access panel to the app.  Machine Learning is something that Google is rapidly deploying in all of their products, from G Suite to Google Cloud Platform.  The good news is that everyday users can also gain the advantages of ML in the everyday apps they provide.

This feature rolled out a few months ago for those who are G Suite customers and principally what it does is use a wide set of patterns to determine the files you need to access quickly.  This isn’t just your most recent files as that’s fairly mundane these days.  No, this looks at things like your calendar or activity on your Drive to bubble up the files you are likely to need.

Google Drive Quick Access

For Quick Access, however, we constructed thousands of simple features from the various signals above (for instance, the timestamps of the last 20 edit events on a document would constitute 20 simple input features), and combined them with the power of deep neural networks to learn from the aggregated activity of our users. By using deep neural networks we were able to develop accurate predictive models with simpler features and less feature engineering effort.

It is a pretty impressive model and frankly, it works just as impressively.  Looking at a meeting I had on my calendar, it bubbled up a Docs file that I had been using for notes around this particular meeting.  I didn’t have to search for it.  As you use Drive and other Google apps like G Suite (which includes the likes of Gmail, Calendar and of course Docs, Sheets and Slides), it will learn you better to give you more personalized results.

For Quick Access to work in Google Drive, you need to have the latest version of the app on your phone or tablet.  The feature should be enabled by default but if not, you can go into Setting to enable it (or disable it). You can read more about it on the Google Research Blog.

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.