Later this year (2021) Google will unify these solutions and bring most used features from both into one solution: Drive for Desktop. Some organisations allow both solutions to be used, depending on the different requirements, which can be confusing for end users and challenging to manage for IT. Drive for Desktop: why, what and your actions A full comparison can be found on this support page. Backup and Sync on the other hand is the consumer version, available for organisations too, which stores all or selected Drive content locally. Most employees use it to free up disk space, decrease time needed to sync files and to facilitate upload and download of files. The difference is that Drive for Desktop is more suitable for organisations as it lets you stream both My Drive and Shared Drive files from the cloud even in an offline mode. Google offers for this need 2 solutions: Google Drive for Desktop (formerly Drive File Stream) and Backup and Sync. When not working on a Chromebook, Google Workspace users might have a need to access and sync files from Drive to their desktop.

Written by Julie Dockx, Head of Digital Workplace at Devoteam G Cloud Syncing to your desktop In this article, we will explain why, how and when you need to act (or not).

Google’s solutions for this, Google Drive for Desktop & Backup and Sync, will be updated still in 2021.

If you are using Google Workspace (previously G Suite) as your collaboration tool, which is great, you might have come across the need to sync files to your desktop for different reasons.

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