You may be set on leaving Google Drive for a better cloud storage service. Alternatively, you may be searching for an easy solution to backing up your Google files. Whatever the reason, this little guide may be just the thing you need. Here is how you can transfer your Google Drive photos and documents in 3 simple steps.
Oftentimes, when you decide it’s time to say goodbye to a cloud storage service and move to another, the most obvious way is to do that manually. Locally downloading all your data, which sometimes may be well beyond the free space on your PC, however can be slow, sometimes impossible and contradicting with the purpose of cloud services in general.
With pCloud, we want to help you have all the documents, presentations and other files you need in one place. That’s why in our latest tweak, we transformed our Picasa backup feature in something that’s more than just a photo backup. Now, you can make a full backup of your Google Drive account in pCloud without effort and it takes the time you would take to make a cup of coffee. You only need to:
1. Open your pCloud account
The first thing you need, in order to easily backup your Google Drive account, is a subscription for pCloud. Creating your pCloud account is simple and easy. You can either do it from www.pcloud.com, or register through the mobile app for Android, iOS or Windows Mobile.
After you have created your pCloud account, open my.pCloud.com from basically any web browser and go to the Backups section on the left menu.
2. Start your Google Drive backup
Once you are in Backups (Hint: it’s located in the left menu of my.pCloud), you will see a list of services from which you can transfer a file copy to pCloud. Google Drive will be your first choice. Click “Start”, allow pCloud access and confirm your backup with “Set backup”.
3. Enjoy your Google photos, videos and documents in pCloud!
When you confirm your Google Drive backup, you will start getting a copy of your Google photos, documents and other files to pCloud.
The initial backup may take up a few moments to finish. After it is ready, you will see a folder named “Backups” among your other files in the file manager. All of the copied content from your Google Drive account will be there, divided in 2 folders:
- Google Drive (containing all of the files that you have saved in your Google Drive account, apart from those created in Google Docs, Google Slides or Google Sheets)
- Shared (storing files that people have shared with you in Google Drive)
Once your first backup is complete, pCloud will make sure to save a copy of your Google Drive files every 14 days so that you don’t lose any important content. If you want to stop your Google Drive backup, you can do so at any moment, again from the Backups section.
Add even more space to your hard drive
When you open your Basic plan with pCloud, you start off with 10 GB free space. Interested?
Alternatively, you can sign up for a Premium or a Premium Plus plan, which will give you up to 500 GB or 2 TB at the price of a cup of coffee or a cup of coffee + a fancy cupcake.