Author: Michael Crider / Source: reviewgeek.com
Google Drive, compared to the attention services like Dropbox and iCloud get, seems to just sit out in the wings hardly looked at. But, much to my surprise, it’s a fantastic service with flexible backup options.
About six months ago I started looking for a backup service.
Not just any old cloud storage service: one that could store the weekly backups from my massive desktop PC, holding a decade’s worth of photos, documents, videos, and even more exotic, larger files like virtual machines.I settled on Google Drive, AKA the new “Google One,” as it’s sometimes branded for consumers. After trying out the general consumer tiers from Dropbox, Box.com, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and a handful of others. For the specific goal of backing up hundreds of gigabytes at once while preserving the file and directory structure of my desktop, while costing as little as possible, it met my needs perfectly.
I think I’m not the only one in this situation, and others would benefit from some head-to-head comparison of paid options. So, without further ado, here are the reasons I settled on Google Drive for my cloud backup system.
Easy File Management
When you install Google Drive’s desktop component, blandly titled “Backup and Sync from Google,” it’s all pretty straightforward. Log into the service, pick a primary folder location on your drive, and start downloading things from the cloud as the initial sync begins. But then you get to this page in the small program:
See that option to add external files to your account? It’s an obvious feature…but one that’s actually very rare, as these backup services go. Dropbox doesn’t do it: everything you want to put on Dropbox’s cloud drive has to be within its specific folder. Microsoft OneDrive, Box.com, and Apple’s iCloud don’t do it: ditto. For all of them, even if you’re paying for terabytes of space, you need to keep all your synced items in a single folder.
That’s a problem for me, since I use a speedy SSD for my desktop’s primary storage drive and a massive, cheap hard drive for backups and other space-hogging files. Google Drive allows me to keep a “primary” folder of synced cloud items on the desktop—a sort of quick “pocket” for frequently-used files that I often access from multiple devices—while also syncing my gigantic backup folder to the cloud.
To get the same thing done in the other services I tried, I’d have to either move my entire cloud folder to the big, slow hard drive (not ideal for frequently-used Photoshop templates), or sync files back and forth between the drives. That puts one more moving part in my setup, between my backup program (Cobian 11) and the cloud storage service itself. I tried to make it work with Dropbox and OneDrive, using tools like Boxifier or Microsoft Synctoy… and at one point managed to make a recursive backup system that kept backing up my SSD over and over again until the entire hard drive was full. iCloud and OneDrive offer desktop and document folder syncing, but still can’t add any other external folders or drives.
To put it simply: Google Drive makes it simple. And If you want your backups to be automatic and effortless, that’s worth a lot.
Excellent Web Tools
Let me tell you about my experience with Dropbox’s paid tiers, trying to handle over 400 GB of data in a single backed-up folder. At one point I realized I had made a mistake in Cobian Backup—a freeware backup application I was using with Dropbox—and would need to start over from scratch with my backup, which would take several days to a week to upload on my home connection. So I deleted the original backup C drive backup folder, and waited.
And waited.
Days…
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