Category: Organize

I’m thrilled to share some exciting updates with you! We’ve been working hard to bring you new features and improvements to Filerev (formerly Clean Drive) to elevate your experience and help you organize your Google Drive files more efficiently. 🌟 Updated App Design We’ve revamped the look and feel of Filerev to make navigating through features a…

Treating Google Drive as a backup isn’t always the best practice when you want to keep your data safe. A good backup needs to be resilient to unintended changes, but since Google Drive syncs changes and doesn’t keep iterative backups, it violates the data backup best practices everyone should be following. It’s really more of a sharing,…

Many people and businesses around the world use Google Drive, Google Workspace, G Suite, and the assorted storage options Google offers as a means of storing and backing up critical data. This data can range anywhere from important family photos to critical documents, to freelance projects, to business files; regardless of what it is, one…

For almost as long as Google Drive has existed, they have offered unlimited storage plans if you pay enough money on a monthly basis. These storage plans are extremely unnecessary for the average user who stores family photos and data they want to back up or transfer, but there are many users with specific use cases that…

Office workers, remote workers, and pretty much anyone employed in any job that needs to deal with paperwork today will sympathize when I say this: Dealing with PDFs can be an incredible hassle. Things are a little easier than they used to be. We’re no longer forced to use Adobe Acrobat just to have a…

Google Drive is a fantastic tool for cloud storage and collaboration, but it has a few drawbacks that can sometimes make it tricky or inconvenient to use. Luckily, you can solve many of those issues with Chrome browser extensions. Here are some of my favorites to expand and augment the capabilities of Google Drive. Note:…

Google Drive is Google Drive, right? Surely, it works the same no matter where you access it. Well, that’s mostly true, but Google being Google, there are quirks of every system they have, and that means there are some subtle but noteworthy differences between the various ways you can access Google Drive.  Let’s talk about them!…

A fact of modern digital life is that, as computing power increases across the board, optimization suffers. After all, when you have a graphics card with multiple gigs of ram attached, you don’t need to compress videos down to the size of postage stamps, and high-speed internet makes it feasible to watch 4K video as…

Google has a variety of different interlocking services that seem like they should be a lot more connected than they are. Few of them are as emblematic of the issue as Google Drive and Google Photos.   Google gives every person with a Google account a specific amount of storage for free, which is shared amongst…

File servers are just computers with large amounts of storage space that are connected to a network or the internet, often with some kind of redundancy, backups, and access controls.  They’re used by everyone from tech-savvy individuals to global megabrands, and there’s a near-infinite amount of nuance to it for different business configurations and setups.…

There are many different ways to use Google Drive. While the standard use case is to upload files to Google Drive when you want them on the cloud or to use Google Drive for Desktop to add it as a system drive and treat it as any other file or folder, these can introduce an…

One of the most convenient features of Google Drive is the ability to share files and folders with another user. Specifically, it’s not just the sharing but the ability to have a file from another user in your Drive without that file taking up space in your Drive. You can have far more stored in…

While Google Drive is used as a collaborative tool and means of storing and sharing files with other users, many people also use it for personal storage. This leads to a very important question: what can someone see when you share a folder with them? If you share a folder full of files with a…

Google Drive’s cloud storage is an excellent tool for storing files and sharing them with others without relying on your connection and uptime remaining constant and steady for everyone else.   Unfortunately, the way Google Drive handles movies and video files can cause issues, so it’s essential to know how to navigate using the system for…

The world of Google Drive and Workspace users has been aflutter recently with distressing news coming from Google HQ. While things have settled since Google walked back its change, the implications are worrisome, and there may be a significant change to Google Drive coming down the pipe in the future. What am I talking about?…

The time has come for a thrilling announcement, a development that’s been brewing behind the scenes for some time – and today, we’re more than ready to share it with you! Your trusted ally in organizing Google Drive files, the entity you’ve known and loved as Clean Drive, is adopting a fresh and dynamic new…

Google Drive is easy to use on a PC by opening up a browser window or installing Google Drive on a Desktop.  It’s also easy to use on an Android device, as it generally comes pre-installed as part of Google’s app package. What about other devices, though? In particular, if you have a tablet or…

Google may be an omnipresent tech mega-giant with fingers in every possible pie, but there are, believe it or not, still plenty of people around the world who don’t use the Google ecosystem for their business or pleasure. Bing has its own dedicated users, Microsoft’s Office suite is in many ways better than Google’s, and…

Many individuals and organizations use Google Drive as a place for backing up their data, but the truth is, synced or mirrored cloud storage like Google Drive isn’t actually as good as a backup as you might think. For example, if you have a hard drive synced with Google Drive, and someone deletes everything on…

Google Drive is great for sharing individual files and folders with other people, but what happens if you need total collaboration and you want the entire contents of your Google Drive to be visible and accessible to someone else? Can you do it, or are there hoops to jump through?  Let’s dig in. Can You…

Google Drive for Education, or rather, Google Workspace for Education, is Google’s offering of their productivity suite for schools and other institutions of education, from K-12 to universities and more. In a previous post, I went over the details of each plan and the features they get you.  Today, I’ll go over the best practices…

Google Drive gives every Google account holder 15 GB of storage space for free, just for having a Google account. While there are a lot of different ways to increase this capacity, both for free and for money, they don’t obviate the need to manage the storage space you have. Sooner or later, you’ll need to…

Google Drive is one of the leading cloud storage solutions for enterprises, including large businesses, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions. Though some recent changes have made schools and universities rethink their policies, it’s still a powerful option. This article will walk through what you, as a school IT administrator, will need to know to get…

Anyone working to manage a large Google workspace environment as an administrator knows how many different things can go wrong in different ways. It’s anything but a well-oiled machine. Sometimes it seems like a miracle that anything works, even before you get into non-standard configurations, third-party apps, and external services. Thankfully, Google knows that things…

Google Drive is a fantastic app for storing and syncing files across multiple devices and backing up data to the cloud, but it comes with a handful of caveats, restrictions, and limitations. One such limitation – that doesn’t make sense when you think about it initially – is that sometimes you’ll try to upload files…

Serious companies, companies in regulated industries, and companies dealing with sensitive information often must manage their data carefully. Data that is stored improperly can be a massive liability, even if nothing happens relating to it. Whether you have legal mandates to retain data for a certain amount of time or a mandate to get rid…

Whenever you’re using a software service as an organization, different people within your organization will have different roles. Sometimes these roles are unofficial, but more often, the app or platform itself will have built-in roles that impact what the user in question can and can’t access.  G Suite is no different; it has both pre-built…

Caching is an essential part of many different kinds of programs and apps. By building and maintaining a cache, your systems can keep data close at hand so it loads quickly and doesn’t need to be downloaded repeatedly.  Web browsers use caches to keep common elements of frequently-used sites locally available, so only the changing…

As a cloud storage platform, Google Drive can ostensibly host any file. However, anyone who has tried to use it for out-of-the-usual use cases might know that you can (occasionally) run into problems. Are there file types that aren’t supported or other restrictions worth knowing? Here’s a rundown of what Google Drive does and does…

Google makes the Android operating system and Google Drive, the cloud storage platform. They also have cloud storage associated with Google accounts, which are required to use most features of an Android device. It stands to reason that all these systems would work nicely together. Right? Unfortunately, Google is less of a single company and…

Google Drive is an excellent platform for data storage, sharing, and collaboration, but sometimes you’ll find that particular files have unique issues you don’t see in your other data.  One of the biggest offenders of this is video files, particularly larger or longer videos. When you upload a video to Google Drive, Google has to…

By default, when you create a new Google account, you are given 15 GB of storage space for free.  This storage space is shared across Google services, including Docs, Sheets, Drive, Gmail, Photos, and any other services you use in Google’s ecosystem.   While 15 GB might sound like a lot – and it is, if all you’re…

Google Drive is a fantastic tool for collaboration, both within an organization and with the general public. It’s also an excellent way to distribute a document or file to an audience; it’s essentially free hosting as long as the file doesn’t violate any of Google’s copyright or IP rules, content guidelines, or other policies. Of…

Google Drive is generally a secure way to store data on the cloud, but as with any cloud service provider, you are not necessarily the only person with access to your data. Google owns the servers that host your data, after all, and that means Google can access them. Google’s data security practices are rigorous,…

If you’re a Mac user, you may be familiar with the DS_Store file. Hidden DS_Store and ._ files are the number one most common hidden files across Google Drive accounts. It makes sense, as Apple shipped over 17% of all personal computers in the United States last year. That’s a lot of DS_Store files being…

While ostensibly, your files on Google Drive are private and solely your own, Google does pay attention to what is uploaded to their servers. They want to avoid being hosts to malware, and they have a duty to minimize criminal activity. Among other things, they scan files uploaded to their Drive accounts to detect copyright…

One of the most significant benefits of a cloud-based file storage system is the ability to share and collaborate on those files. There’s just one issue: what happens when more than one person wants to edit any given file at any given time? Different apps and platforms have different ways of handling this. For example,…

With Google Drive, you can store files on the cloud, allowing access to them from any device you can use to log into Google’s services. You might use this as a data backup solution to store files online so you can work on them across different devices or as a collaborative tool to share cloud-stored…

Google has been pushing to unify many of its services over the years. This change has been displayed in various moves, such as rolling together photo storage between Google Drive and Google Photos, tying together Google and YouTube accounts, and making Gmail share the storage space of Google Drive. Though this last change has been…

Google Drive is an excellent way of storing files in the cloud, but there are many different ways it can go wrong. In particular, depending on how you use it, you may get different results than expected. One of the most prominent use cases for a cloud storage app like Google Drive is to use…

Google Drive is an incredible piece of convenient engineering, but it can also be highly frustrating, especially when it’s doing something inconvenient that hinders your application usage. One such issue is that Google Drive can duplicate files when you don’t want them to. Google does this for a few different reasons, some of which are…

Google Workspace is an essential tool for thousands of businesses worldwide, ranging from accounts with just a few users to large enterprises with thousands or tens of thousands of sub-accounts. Administration becomes a significant burden with any service as you add more users.  While Google offers unlimited storage to their enterprise customers, that doesn’t mean…

Google Drive is an excellent cloud storage system, and you can use it in many different ways. Some people use it to transfer files in bulk from one location to another. You upload them all to Google Drive on one device, then download them on another. It skips needing to put all that data on…

Google Drive has a ton of utility, but sometimes it has just as many ways for downloads to fail as there are use cases. In some cases, Google is excellent at documenting errors and giving you options for dealing with them. Other times, it feels like your error could be about anything. Unfortunately, the “failed-forbidden”…

Google Drive is an excellent platform for cloud storage and collaboration, but it’s not unlimited.  While Google used to promise unlimited storage, they’ve changed many of those limits over the years.  While getting “unlimited” storage (with caveats) is possible, you may have to jump through some hoops to get it. On top of that, there are other…

Shortcuts are a powerful tool for organization, navigation, and managing the clutter of your Google Drive.  They’re easy to create, but you can use advanced tricks to improve them. There are also some quirks with how Google handles shortcuts to files or folders when those files or folders are located in shared drives or have…

Google gives everyone with a Google account 15 GB of storage by default. You can expand this limitation through various means and take action to reduce your space usage. Still, the fact remains that a cap is always going to be there outside of a few specific, enterprise-level situations. What happens when your Google Drive (or general Google…

Google Drive is a fantastic tool for file storage and collaboration. One of the best features is the ability to upload a file to your Drive and share it with others. Those other people have the file in their Drive, but it doesn’t take up any of their storage quotas; they can access and edit…

Google is notorious for making changes to systems, splitting them and merging them, keeping legacy versions around, and changing their plans to retire some things. They occasionally retire plans while many people still love and use them. Google Drive is no different, with storage available through Google Drive, Google One, Google Workspace, G Suite, Google…

Did you know that before the mid-1980s, when you deleted a file, it was gone for good? There was no way to recover it. The modern version of a trash can or recycle bin, which stores deleted files until a time limit comes up or you empty it yourself, didn’t exist until it was invented…

Google Drive is an excellent application for storing, transferring, and managing files in both a personal and a business setting. However, it’s not always immediately clear how to perform various tasks you believe you should be able to do. Sometimes, the functionality exists but is named strangely or hidden in menus. Other times, something you…

Google Drive and Google Photos are both excellent options to store and sync photos between devices in a central account. But which is better? You might think it’s the app specifically designed for photos, but Google Photos has limitations that are worth considering.  Google did not tie Google Photos to Google Drive initially. In the…

Sometimes, it seems like cloud storage is infinite. With millions of servers and exabytes of storage space between them, any person should have access to more space than they would ever need.  Even businesses generating terabytes of data can find cloud-based storage solutions. Unfortunately, cloud storage platforms like Google Drive still have caps on the…

One of the best use cases for Google Drive is using it as a single collaborative storage location for a business. You have multiple employees – maybe two or three, perhaps a few dozen, maybe an entire department or organization – and they all need access to your organization’s Drive.  Furthermore, some of your employees…

Google Drive is a fantastic way to leverage the cloud to store your files, from small text documents to photos to large video files and other massive projects. There’s just one problem: managing large files with Google Drive can be a huge hassle! Uploads fail, downloads take forever, and you may need to wait for…

Apple is often regarded as an isolated ecosystem of apps, with minimal cross-over with PC programs. The reason is due, in part, to Apple creating their own versions of many popular features offered by PC companies. Apple even offers cloud storage through its iCloud system. However, iCloud isn’t necessarily the best option for cloud storage on…

While it may not seem like it, there’s technically limited storage space available to internet users.  There are only so many hard drives and only so much media, and while the amount available is incomprehensibly vast, the amount any one person can access is comparatively tiny. Take, for example, your Google Drive. Cloud storage is…

Google Drive is one of the most helpful cloud storage systems available, but it has one significant limitation: it limits how much space you have to store files. Moreover, that space limit is tied to your overall Google Account, not just to Drive. That means attachments in your email, files made in Google Docs, Google…

This article shows multiple ways to view your files & folders by size in Google Drive. It also covers how to see specific types of files by size and sort them.

This article shows multiple ways to create folders in Google Drive and provides shortcuts and tips to have you creating and organizing folders like a pro.

This post showcases Google Drive apps that will extend Google Drive’s functionality and increase your efficiency in Google Drive.

It is now easy to find and remove empty folders in Google Drive.

How to view your Google Drive Folder Size with a simple online tool. View the size of your largest folders, empty folders or browse your folders by size.

Is Google going to automatically replace files in multiple locations with shortcuts? I go into detail explaining what this really means.

This article discusses multiple tactics to reduce your Google Drive storage usage. Find what is taking up space in Google Drive and eliminate the cruft.