Transcription
How To Use Google Backup And Sync
Hey everyone. In today's video, I want to show you a really useful Google service called Google backup and sync and what backup and sync do is it takes your computer, your PC, or your Mac, and he takes the information on there that you have, like, if you have stuff on the desktop or in different folders and automatically backs them up to the cloud on Google drive.
So what's useful about that is if you ever lose something on your computer if your computer hard drive fails. It's backed up automatically. So I'm going to show you exactly how to set it up and to access Google backup and sync. Just go ahead and go to this website here. I'll put in the description below, basically google.com/drive/download.
Now, let me explain something that I found a bit confusing here. There are two versions of Google backup and sync, depending on if you're just an individual person and doing this for personal reasons or if you have the Google workspace and you're doing this for work now, for some reason, they're not called the same thing.
The personal one is called backup and sync and that's what I'm covering in this video. But the other one is actually just called Google drive and Google drive file stream. So I'll cover this one in a different video, although is almost the same process. So this one, even if you're doing this for work with Google workspace should work, but let me just show you the difference here too.
Now, I just went inside of my Google drive. drive.google.com. If you come here and you don't have one, you could just create a Google drive. Again, this is separate from backup and sync, but you do need a Google drive, and let me show you Google drive for Google workspace. This is a paid version. It looks almost the same, but you see that Google logo up there.
It's a little bit different. So under personal Google drive, you could get Google backup and sync by pressing this icon right here and get back up and sync and it's going to say for PC or Mac, depending on what computer you're using on the workspace. Again, I don't want to confuse you with the workspace. This is a whole different Google Drive account that I'm paying for.
The other one is free, but if you press this same icon is Google Drive for desktop. Okay, just the difference between the two and the naming back to this. So all you have to worry about right now is go to google.com/drive/download and you want to get back up and sync for your Mac or PC. That's really stepping one to other stuff.
I just want to show you to kind of clarify between the two different services and you'll have to go ahead and download this to your computer because this is how this works. It needs to have access to your computer in order to back things up. So I'll just go ahead and open a file that downloaded down here and I need to take it into my application folder again, a little bit different if you're on a PC, but the actual application is pretty much the same and I'll go to my application folder and open up, back up and sync and I give it all to access it. Ask for it. Let me go ahead and press gets started and I do need to log into the Google accounts.
So I did have to sign in to Google here. So use the same Google account where you want everything to be backed up too. So I'm going to use my personal Google account here. Okay, then it's going to show me this folder and by the way, if you ever lose this window on Mac, it's just up here is this icon that should up here on here on a PC is just in the bottom right corner.
Just like all these icons on Mac show up on top of PC that show up on the bottom. So make sure you click that to get this window back. If you ever lose this window nowhere, it's going to show your computer and it's going to ask you, what do you want to back up by default your desktop? Everything on your desktop will up here.
Your documents and your pictures will appear to, you could check any of these off. I actually use Google photos for pictures, so I don't really have any pictures on my computer, but Google photo is a really good service. You could learn more about it here. I do have a complete tutorial on this as well.
Then what if you wanted to back up more files here? So you choose another folder that doesn't appear by default. So literally anything from your download folder documents, folder. Anything you want, you could go ahead and select it and then open it, and then it will be added to here. So in this case, 22 more gigabytes are going to be added, which is actually more than the free Google drive storage.
They give you. So I have to pay for extra space. So I'm not going to back this up right now, then with photos and videos, you could do original quality. This is going to take up more space or high quality, which. Reduces the file size and you shouldn't really notice the difference unless you're a photographer and you really need the full resolution here and you could go ahead and upload two photos here, Google photo here. I use my phone's app for Google photos. So I'm going to ignore this here and press next. I finally, it's going to sync files from my drive to a folder on this computer. Okay, so this is how it's going to work. It's going to sync my drive to this computer.
I make sure this is checked on and he says sync everything on my drive. Okay, that's good. That's what I want and I'm going to press start and I'm going to give it access here. If it's going to ask for that and you should get a couple of pop-ups here. It's just telling you what's going on and there is a new folder here now called Google drive and it's going to show up on your PC too and I have other things like Dropbox is a different service that does this kind of thing. You'll have one drive from Microsoft that does this kind of thing. I have iCloud, that's the Mac version for this kind of thing. You see, this is moving these arrows again on a PC, so on the bottom, but what it's doing is it's basically putting everything from my Google drive over here and it's sinking up everything from my computer to Google drive. So this is a great way. Every time I want to access something from Google drive, I could do a right from here and not jump into the website, Google drive. Now, if I go to drive.google.com and log into that same platform, now I have this tab called computers and if I click it, it's going to show me the backup from that Mac. This is the new one I just set up. So if I double click this. It's going to show me those files that I just backed up. Now, as soon as this syncs up, if I go to the desktop, I will see everything on my computers, the desktop in this folder, in the cloud.
Okay, so that's really, really useful, but you could see it's got a ways to go here because I have a lot of files that are actually taken from my Google drive to my computer. Now, as you see, some of these are going to get this green checkmark next to them. That means they're sunk. That means they're on your computer.
On this folder on your computer and they're also backed up to Google drive and if you right-click on any of them, you could directly view it here and it will open up Google drive for you on the website and you could share using Google drive or just copy the link. Now they have a link associated with these files to make them easier to share.
So if I just go copy link, it just copies it to my clipboard and I could paste it in an email, for example, really, really easy to use. So I waited about an hour for everything to sync up here, fiber internet. So it kind of went fast, but 10 gigabytes of information was added and I have five left cause it's 15 total.
So you could see that over here, but it sank all my Google photos too, because I use the same Gmail account here for, or my Google photos. But if I go to the computer now, and again, you can have multiple computers. I don't know if I mentioned that before, but you could jump in and now if I click on the desktop, everything on my desktop is now on Google drive.
I didn't actually drag and drop these to Google drive this automatic backup and sync did that for me. So let me show you my desktop here. So all of this right here is also over here now and look at this though. I just want to point this up because if you delete something from here or from here, It will replicate it.
You will mirror it. So if I just go ahead and delete this, okay, I'll just go ahead and press delete, move to trash, and if I go to Google drive now and give it a second. Okay. As soon as the sync is done, it should give me a pop-up message and this file, I just deleted this on my desktop. See, he says he wants to remove it from Google drive.
Okay, so I could press restore to put it back or press remove and if I press remove, I will lose it on Google drive as well. See, it just disappeared in a second. Okay, same thing. If I choose one here, if I choose this file here, press delete. If I go back to my desktop now, right here, it's going to actually disappear from there.
So this is the file that I just deleted. Let me give it a second. Look at that. If I press remove. It's going to disappear from there. So just be careful, they are synced up, which is good. That means they're on two locations on your internal hard drive on your computer and on Google drive because of backup and sync.
But whatever you do in one happens in the other one. Okay, so that's what I want you to pay attention to, but they do end up in the trash. So if you go to your trash bin here, There was well beaten your trash, but every 30 days, dis trash gets emptied out. So make sure you know that because you won't permanently keep them in the trash.
Okay, so now after the sink is done, it's going to take a while. Well here, especially if you have a lot of photos on your choice to back up the Google photos, too. If you do this now, anytime you create something on the desktop of your computer, as long as you sync that to Google drive, you will duplicate it in the cloud and make a backup version of it there, but it does sync up.
So when you delete something on your desktop, it does delete there too, but it will protect you from hard, dry failure. It will give you some version history, lot of different advanced features that I'll cover in upcoming videos too. But Google drive backup and sync is one of my favorite things out there.
From Google, that's completely free to use for personal use and you could use it for Google workspace that I'll cover in the next upcoming video. Thanks so much for watching. Please give it a thumbs up. I'll see you next time.