Geeks on Campus

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Google Drive Sync

Posted by jeggent on July 25, 2013

I may be a little late to the party with having an online file share keeping files in sync between computers.  But now that I’m using it, I love it!  I know there are other options such as Dropbox but since I was already using Google Docs, for documents and spreadsheets, it was seamless to use Google Drive for other files also.  Google Drive is great and I recommend it all the time to people as an MS Office replacement.

I eventually followed Google’s prompting and downloaded Google Drive for my desktop at work and laptop at home.  That’s when the fun started.  I have projects that I work on both at work and at home.  I’ve tried the USB flash drive and uploading the files to a server each time I finished working on them but I would inevitably forget and have version control issues.  With Google Drive for PC I have a folder setup to sync and just save my development files in that folder.  It takes only seconds each time I modify a file for it to automatically upload to Google Drive.  Then when I use the other machine it automatically downloads any files that changed so I’m always working on the latest version.  It even has a little indicator graphic on the file’s icon to show that it has been synced.  This has been a real time saver and helped me to finish projects faster by not needing to wait until I can retrieve the latest version of a file.

P.S.  With smaller files like PHP and HTML changes are synced in just seconds (or less).