Using Google Drive to Store and Share Documents and Artwork

I’ve been looking lately for a more secure and reliable place to store all our artwork files and customer documents.  We have for so long had a shared network drive with an ever increasing list of client folders in.

I wanted to have this backed up so that we could never lose the data.

You can easily setup a google drive account for free if you have a google account.  If you have gmail or use any of google’s other services then you already have an account you can use for google drive.

You initially get a free 5GB drive space which to be fair will serve the average user more than adequately.  We have upgraded to a 200GB drive space to backup all of our client artwork.

I’ve put together a step by step guide to setting up google drive and sharing a file or folder with us…

Sign in to Google

Seems fairly straight forward.

Once you have either created your account or signed in, you will then be able to setup a google drive account. You can either google search for “google drive”or you can click this link. There is a button on the top right of that page that looks like the button to the right.  Click this and you will be given a free 5gb google drive storage account absolutely free.

Everything is fairly self explanatory from here.  You can download the google drive local client and this basically adds a favourites folder (on a PC and a Mac) to your “Computer” or “Finder” standard window.   Anything you store in this folder gets automatically synced to the online google drive and is permanently backed up.  You can also use the online google drive pages to upload files and documents.

With google chrome you can also just drag and drop files into the window to upload them.  I would not convert them to google document types though to be honest as there is sometimes some conversion issues.

Check out the video below that shows to what level your data is stored and protected.  I watched this video a while ago as it was featured on googles microsite story of send.

Download Video with Vixy.net | Convert YouTube to MP3

Some things I don’t Like about Google drive.

Any folders that are “Shared with me” are all only accessible online. So having a shared file on multiple users computers is not all that easy.  I.e. we have a shared work folder that we all need to access.  We regularly upload and download items such as artwork and files to it.  But there is no way to easily upload files to folders that are shared with you.  This is a slight step backwards as we still have to use the local shared folder on a machine that is then synced with the online version of the files.

This can create a time delay and it would be better if the folder could be accessed directly using the google drive client on each individual machine.  Having said all that it’s still permantly backup up within a few hours and we can also have a good revision history of all the files.

Anyway… If you want to send us any artwork files then please share them with “david@promotional-products.org” or your sales person.  We are all on google apps and we all use google drive.