Instituto Superior Técnico

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How to transfer content from Google Drive to your computer?

Using Google Takeout

1. Go to  http://drive.google.com/, using your tecnico account login;

2. Click the icon with your initials on the top right corner;

3. Select Manage your Google Account;

4. Select  Data & Privacy at your left;

5. Select Data from apps and services you use;

6. Under  Download or delete your data, select  Download your data;

7. Click on  Deselect all;

8. Scroll down and select the option on Google Drive;

9. Scroll down and select Next;

10. Select the export format and select Download link via email;

11. Select Export once;

12. In file type, select .zip

13. Select the file maximum dimension. We suggest  4GB. If your content is larger than this threshold, it will be split in several files.

14. Select  Create export

After some time, which may be minutes or hours depending on the data amount, you will receive by email a link that you may follow to download your contents.

Using Google Drive desktop app

The easier method to migrate the content of your Google Drive to your computer is to use the Google Drive sync client.  This application enables to create a local folder on your computer that mirrors the content of the whole Google Drive cloud.   We provide instructions for installation and configuration of Google Drive sync client for PC and Mac – Drive for desktop

Attention: Please note that Google Docs, either Google Docs, Google Sheets or Google Slides are never copied to the local drive when using the Google Drive Sync client: they are only represented on the local drive by a link that points to the file location on the Google cloud. Therefore, backing up the local directory do not work for Google Doc files. For full download of these, you should use Google Takeout (see previous point).

If the final goal is to reduce the volume of storage used on Google Drive, when the synchronisation is complete the  content to be removed from Google Drive must be moved from the Google local folder to a different folder, external hard drive or other cloud service (One Drive, Dropbox, etc).