Google Drive is much more than a cloud-based file storage and syncing service with a generous free storage plan; it's also an integral part of a full, collaborative office suite. You can use Google Drive to store documents created in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and to back up files from your computer (or go with cloud-only file storage). Paid plans, branded as Google One, offer extra storage and other perks, including Google AI tools. Either way you go, Google Drive impresses with its ability to store, back up, create, and edit files, whether you work solo or as part of a team. As a result, Google Drive earns our Editors' Choice endorsement for top-notch consumer-end file storage and syncing services, alongside Microsoft OneDrive.

Google Drive vs. Google Drive for Business

There are key differences between the consumer and business Google Drive versions (available for the browser, macOS, and Windows), the chief among them being increased storage. Consumer Google Drive offers 15GB of cloud storage, while business Google Drive (part of the Google Workspace suite) starts at 30GB and caps out at 5TB. On top of that, the consumer Google Drive is free; the business Google Drive requires a Workspace subscription (starting at $8.40 per month or $7 per month with an annual plan).

Plans and Prices: An Extremely Generous Free Tier

It doesn't cost anything to sign up for a Google account and start using Google Drive. With one, you get 15GB of storage, which is generous compared with what other storage services give you for free (Box and Dropbox offer 10GB and 2GB, respectively). That storage features Google Gemini, which lets you pull file and folder information quickly (I'll touch on that later in the review). Need even more storage space? You can upgrade to a paid Google One account (starting at $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year), which includes a hefty 100GB of storage shared across Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail.

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Moving up the Google One ladder, you'll find the Google AI Plus plan ($7.99 per month or $79.99 per year), which offers 200GB of storage plus the Flow and Veo AI-powered video apps, and the NotebookLM AI-based research and note-taking tool, which produces spoken summaries of your notes and documents. For the slightly higher price of $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, Google AI Premium gives you 2TB of storage, ten times more than the AI Plus plan. The top-tier AI package comes with 5TB of storage for $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year. Starting with the Premium plan, all higher-level plans include a 10% discount on Pixel phones, Nest smart home devices, and other products in the Google Store. 

For comparison, the free Microsoft OneDrive includes just 5GB of storage, a personal vault, and Microsoft 365, complete with online collaboration tools. Paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription ($9.99 per month or $99 per year) includes 6TB of OneDrive storage, split among six people (Google offers 2TB for the same price). Microsoft also offers installable Office productivity applications, Teams, and premium Office templates.

The free Apple iCloud Drive includes 5GB of storage and access to several apps, including online office, mail, and calendar tools. An iCloud+ account (Apple's paid cloud storage) adds 50GB for 99 cents per month, 200GB for $2.99 per month, 2TB for $9.99 per month, and scales up to 12TB for $59.99 per month. At all levels, you get the quasi-VPN service Apple calls Private Relay, but it only works in Safari. If you don't have an Apple device, you can sign up for a free account with 1GB of storage; this can be useful if you want to use Apple Mail or share documents with Apple-using colleagues.

If you simply want big storage at a low price, it's hard to top IDrive, an Editors' Choice winner that charges just $6.99 per month for a beefy 5TB.

Google Drive on the Web: Just Keeps Getting Better

Google Drive's online design has improved over the years and is now more intuitive than ever. It's easy to change the file view to see either thumbnail images or a list, and you can further organize folders and sub-folders by favoriting them or using color-coding. As with other services, Google lets you drag and drop files from your computer into any open Drive folder in the browser to upload them to your account.

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If you use Google Drive to sync files from other devices besides your main PC, you'll find them in the left pane under Computers, listed by device name. In a nice touch, you can rename them to something more memorable. If you're a Google Drive power user, make sure to check the Storage section, which opens a handy menu that lists your files in descending size order so you can remove large files you no longer need. In addition to supporting Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Drive can store forms, drawings, maps, PDFs, images, and other files. You can even integrate a wide range of third-party web apps to work with other file types, such as CAD or music files (more on that below). I won't get into the office suite features here. For that, see my review of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

If you mostly work in the Apple universe and store your photos in iCloud Drive, you can use Google Drive to automatically duplicate your iCloud photos, either the full library or selected images. Anyone who wants multiple backups of crucial data–and that should include you–should take advantage of this incredibly beneficial option.

Google Drive on Desktop: Tight Integration With Your PC

In the relatively distant past, Google called its desktop client for syncing by different names: Backup & Sync for consumers and File Stream for business accounts. I mention this for two reasons. First, you may come across those names in old help documents or articles. Second, if you installed an older version of the client, you should uninstall it and download the latest Google Drive for Desktop application. It's much better. When you install it, it alerts you if you have the old version installed and asks whether you'd like to remove it.

The useful Google Drive desktop application is available for macOS or Windows. It is not in either OS's app store, however. You must download it from the browser and run an installer. There's no version available for Linux, but ChromeOS uses Google Drive for all its storage, so it's built into that operating system.

If you've used other backup and syncing apps before, Google Drive is a bit different. With some dedicated backup services, including Backblaze, you can select the areas of your computer you want to back up and choose multiple locations at once. With Google Drive, you pick individual folders, one at a time. I like this flexibility. For folders that include images, you can upload them to your standard Google Drive, Google Photos, or both. Choosing the latter option doubles the storage used by the images.

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Once you have the Google Drive desktop application installed, you'll see an entry for it in macOS Finder or Windows File Explorer, where you can access files just as you would local ones, even if you've chosen the streaming option (more on that in a bit). It's an appreciated integration. You also get right-click context menu options to store selected files in Google Drive or to make the files available offline or via the cloud, which is useful for offline work or freeing up desktop storage, respectively.

Sharing Files, Integrations, and Offline Access

You can share any files stored on Google Drive. You have good control over making a file publicly available via a link, restricting access to specific people, and determining whether someone has read-only or editing privileges. However, you still can't password-protect a shared file or set an expiration date for the link, as you can with OneDrive. Box, Dropbox, and other services also offer more options for sharing files. For example, Dropbox lets you create a link with an optional expiration date.

However, there's one potentially undesirable aspect of Google Drive sharing: anyone on the web can add whatever they want to your Shared With Me section. Most of the time, the files are the ones you want. Still, if someone has your Google Drive email address, they can post something you may not want. Google blocks known malware, but that doesn't stop someone with your email address from placing something offensive, disturbing, or just plain unwanted in your Google Drive. It would be better if you received an alert, so you could block, approve, or reject new files.

On a happier note, Google Drive integrates with as many web services, such as DocuSign and Slack, making it a valuable productivity tool. However, don't expect Microsoft's online apps to integrate with Google Drive, or vice versa. If you want to edit Microsoft Excel or Word documents, you must import them into Google Drive. Of course, any changes you make to the file in Google's apps won’t sync with the original copy. On top of that, you may lose some of the original formatting.

For offline access, you must install a Google Docs Offline extension into Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Then you'll need to enable offline access from the file menu for any document you want to open when your device isn't connected to the internet. After that preparation, you can click on a Google document to open a local copy in a browser whenever you don't have internet access. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. One problem I've repeatedly encountered over the years is that, even after enabling offline access, the file still won't open when I'm offline. In those cases, I had to disable and then re-enable offline access while online to remedy the situation. I strongly recommend testing offline access before you need it—and you can do this simply by temporarily disabling your network connection.

One other point to keep in mind. When you enable offline access, you can't directly edit the file’s content. Google Drive stores its offline data in hidden, arbitrarily named folders that you can access only by opening the file in your browser. I much prefer OneDrive's approach; it keeps a full copy of your online documents in a folder that's visible on your system, so you can open them from anywhere.

File Options: Streaming Mode vs. Mirroring Mode

The Google Drive desktop app gives you two options for maintaining files on your desktop and in the cloud. The default option is Streaming, which means that your documents live entirely in the cloud. The second option, Mirroring, gives you access to all your files even if you don't have web access. If, like me, you want to make sure you have access to your files even if you can’t access the internet, you might be tempted to choose Mirroring. That said, it has disadvantages, even if you have enough disk space on your machine to store all your files locally.

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When I switched Google Drive's preferences from Streaming to Mirroring, I was able to open and edit this review in Google Docs even without an internet connection. But when I switched back to Streaming and reopened the review, the changes I made in Mirroring mode weren’t reflected in the document. The reason was that Google Drive uses different folders for storing files in the two modes, and changes made in one mode aren't reflected when you switch to the other unless you ensure that all your files are fully synced beforehand.

Mobile Apps, Search, AI Summaries, and OCR

Google Drive has mobile apps for Android and iOS that let you view files on your phone or tablet. In some cases, you can edit files in Google Drive, though the apps often suggest editing in Docs or Sheets. You can, however, read and add comments to files from the Google Drive mobile app, which is great for editing on the go.

Many file syncing and storage apps, including Dropbox and OneDrive, automatically upload images and videos that you take on your phone or tablet. That way, you never have to remember to back them up. The Google Drive mobile app lacks that feature, though the Google Photos app has it. And if you upgrade to a Google One account, that service's mobile app duplicates functions in the regular Google Drive app, including phone backup and storage management.

The files you store in Google Drive are highly searchable. One way is through optical character recognition (OCR). When you save and sync image and PDF files in Google Drive, the app scans them for text and makes them searchable. To test it, I uploaded a PDF of a chocolate cake recipe and ensured the word "chocolate" wasn't in the filename. Seconds after uploading the file, I searched for "chocolate" across all my Google Drive files, and the app found it straight away. 

Another way to search, albeit in a different fashion, is to use Google Gemini. With the AI tool, you can quickly summarize a folder's content, which is useful if it has many files (or lengthy ones like a wordy document or PDF). In testing, Gemini accurately summarized documents in a creative writing folder and provided a surprisingly "thoughtful" literary analysis inspired by my prompts.

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Apple iCloud Drive and Microsoft OneDrive also use OCR on images and PDFs, applying tags to photos and extracting text that you can see in the info panel. If you have more OCR needs, see our tutorial on how to turn PDFs and image files into Word docs.

How Secure Is Google Drive?

Google's data centers are highly secure, as they are geographically distributed, have completed all relevant SOC audits, and meet all necessary standards to protect your data. The company says that data is "encrypted when it's stored on disk, stored on backup media, or traveling between data centers." Could an attacker steal your password and access files you store in Drive? Yes. But Google offers additional protections to secure your account, including support for multiple multi-factor authentication options.

Some online backup services let you choose an encryption key that's in your possession alone, so that not even the company's employees can decrypt your files. If you go this route, be careful not to lose your encryption password, or your data will be gone for good. OneDrive offers a Personal Vault that requires an extra authentication step before its contents become visible. Google Drive has no comparable feature.

As for privacy, a couple of comforting statements appear in the Google Drive documentation. First: "We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—including Drive—for advertising purposes, period." And the other is: "We access your private content only when we have your permission or are required to by law." Note, however, that governments can cast broad nets to collect the data they want to examine, and the number of requests grows substantially every year.

The service provides useful controls to disable or delete the information that Google records about you and your activities. The hardest part is reading through all your options and finding the information you want to control or delete without first going down the wrong rabbit hole.

The company has a transparency report—something we like to see—that shows how many requests it receives for user information and for government access to data. But Google/Alphabet is a massive company with many divisions, products, and services. Even its transparency report is just a long list of additional links, so you might spend some time finding what you want.