Mirroring Google Drive – What It Is and How to Use It?
Google Drive is a major Internet storage and file-sharing platform from the search engine giant. It is used by millions of people across the globe to store and share documents, photos, videos, and other files.
If you want to mirror Google Drive data, read on. But we’re sure you won’t want to mirror any duplicates on Google Drive to your computer. So what do you do? Use Cloud Duplicate Finder to run an automated scan and delete Google Drive duplicates.
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Google Drive comes with a handy facility to sync files across multiple devices and stay up-to-date with real-time changes. It offers several other benefits from syncing offline modified files to keeping a backup of user data.
Streaming or Mirroring Google Drive – What’s the Difference?
When you install the Google Drive application on your PC, there are two options: Stream or Mirror your drive. What are they? Which one should you select?
Mirroring Google Drive
Use this option to keep a copy of all the Google Drive files on your computer. It saves your Google Drive contents offline so that you can access and modify them even without an Internet connection. This feature has its own benefits.
Advantages
- Your files become instantly available even when you don’t have an Internet connection.
- You can make changes to your files without an Internet connection. When you save the file, any changes you’ve made will be synced online once you’re connected to the Internet.
- All files are pre-synced offline. This makes opening files faster and saves time and effort. Your files need not be downloaded at the time you need to open them.
- Mirroring can be especially beneficial when you’re away from home and have limited access to the Wi-Fi. You can continue to work on your documents and files, as if they are originally stored locally.
Disadvantages
- The primary disadvantage of mirroring Google Drive contents is it takes your disk space. As you mirror your files offline, it takes a huge amount of storage. This can be an issue if you’ve a large chunk of data on Google Drive or your hard disk is running out of storage.
Streaming Google Drive
Use this option to save all the Google Drive files in your cloud account. You can still access them from your PC as and when you want. You can also opt to have individual files and folders to be available offline. You’ll need an Internet connection every time you want to open an online-only file.
Advantages
- Storage friendly: Saves your storage. When you stream Google Drive, only those files that you need are downloaded locally.
- Bandwidth friendly: Since no unnecessary files are downloaded, this saves a lot of Internet bandwidth. Your Internet bandwidth is only used for files that are needed.
Disadvantages
- You’ll need an Internet connection every time you want to access a file that was not synced locally
How to Mirror Google Drive?
Now, let’s get back to the procedure to mirror your Google Drive files.
- Download and install Google Drive for Desktop.
- Click on the cog icon and select Preferences.
- Click the Google Drive tab on the left.
- Select the Mirror files option.
- Click on Change to specify a different directory for mirroring your files and then click on Confirm Location.
- Click on Save.
Final Conclusion
Mirroring or not is up to the user. If the user intends to frequently access all the files in the Google Drive account offline and they have adequate storage space on the hard disk, mirroring can be beneficial. If the user is running out of storage on the hard disk and they need to access only a few files at a time, streaming is recommended.
