Chrome Story

Chromebooks Will Soon Have Google Drive as Default Download Folder

If you are familiar with the Files app on a Chromebook, you will know that there are two important sections; Downloads and Google Drive. Downloads are your local drive, and this is the default location for files you download to your Chromebook.

This is changing. Here is a commit log I found today:

Set drive as the default download folder

This CL modifies download directory policy handler to enable the drive to be set as the default download folder in Chromebooks.

Google is planning to make Google Drive as your default download location on Chromebooks. When this is set, all the files you download will be uploaded to your Google Drive account and stay there. It is good if you have a good internet connection and bandwidth to spare. If you are worried about your bandwidth usage, this is a thing to worry about. Because when you download a  1MB file,  Chromebook uploads it to the Drive, so your usage becomes 2MB, double.

This of course can be changed in settings, so no worries!

The positive side of this change is, you do not lose any files when you format your Chromebook, or hmm, say, something happens to your Chromebook. Since the files are saved on Google Drive, you will get them back when you download to another Chromebook, or any other device with Google Drive, or any computer where you can log in to your Google Drive account on the browser.

One more thing

The change we are talking about here is, making this default. This feature is already available on Chromebooks. I mean, you can change your default download location to Google Drive. Here is how to do it.

  1. Click the status area in the lower-right corner, where your account picture appears.
  2. Select Settings.
  3. Click Show advanced settings at the bottom of the page.
  4. In the “Downloads” section, click the Change button to select a default download location.

In

3 responses to “Chromebooks Will Soon Have Google Drive as Default Download Folder”

  1. jharmwood
    John

    More flexibility is far better than being locked into a default or fewer choices. I have many devices which use four different operating systems. I feel much more comfortable leaving my personal and work data in Dropbox as opposed to Google arrive which I use for 81gb of downloaded news videos and another 10gb of articles saved as pdf files. I wish I could add Dropbox as a location to save files as I can in Android, or on my MacBook.

    Reply
  2. Ram

    It would be nice to get a bit more advanced level functions like download to GDrive based on file types, size and a combination of certain properties. Another thing missing right now is on organizing the files within GDrive. Some thoughts into organizing the contents within folders will be another good thing than ending us with a million files in 1 folder, (please indicate if all this is already there in case I’m missing).

    Thanks!

    Reply
    1. Rick Shortt

      Ram,

      You can already create as many folders and as many levels of nested folders as you like in Google Drive (or even in the Downloads folder for that matter). If you are in the Files app, just right click and you will see the menu option. If in Drive on the web, just click on the red Create button near the upper left corner.

      Reply

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