A good alternative to the local hard drives that we have on our PC to store our own data, at the moment it is cloud storage services. Thanks to them we can upload several gigabytes of our own content and save space on our computer. Serve as a clear example of all this Google’s proposal with Drive.
In fact, today we can say that many of the technological giants present us with their own proposals in this regard. We do not need to remember that Microsoft in Windows itself offers us its client for all this, we are talking about OneDrive . Here we can store all kinds of data and files or even make backup copies on remote servers. Obviously, all this is done through the Internet, so the speed of both upload and download is not comparable to when we save on the disk drives.
However, as we mentioned before, these cloud services are an excellent alternative to local storage, either internal or external drives. We generally make use of these platforms through their web version . For this we do not need more than an internet browser to be able to access the reserved space with our credentials. But at the same time we can draw on the clients that many of these platforms present us with.
These are actually programs that we install on our PC to access the online service in the cloud to upload and download our own content . In the same way, these clients offer us some interesting additional functions, such as backups in the cloud. This is the case of the aforementioned Google Drive that we are going to focus on now.
Systems for backup copies in Google Drive
Once we have installed the aforementioned search giant client on our computer, by default it is placed as an icon on the Taskbar . Therefore, to interact with it and configure it to our liking, all we have to do is click on it to see its interface. It is worth mentioning that we have the possibility of customizing some interesting parameters regarding its operation. To do this, click on the gear-shaped icon that is located in the upper right corner.
This will give us a drop-down list of options where we opt for the so-called Preferences. In the new configuration window that appears on the screen, on the left side, click on the section that says Drive Folders . Now it will be when we see on the screen the two available methods to make automated backup copies in Google Drive. Here we have one called View files without downloading them, and the second system Replicate files .
At this point we should know that the main difference between both methods is that the first one only saves a backup copy on the remote server of our account. As we mentioned before, this will allow us to save a good amount of space on our local drives. In addition, to access the contents, the client creates a virtual disk drive that we access from the Windows file explorer.
On the other hand, the second method, in addition to the remote backup of our information, also saves the same on our PC drives . This means that we will have the same ones both on the remote server and on our computer.
It is true that we can access all of this more fluidly and even without an internet connection, but at the same time we are sometimes spending disk space unnecessarily. Now all that remains is to choose the storage method that most interests us from those proposed by Google Drive.
