Summary
The whole point of adding Google Drive to File Explorer is to take pressure off your SSD. In my case, though, the opposite was happening. My SSD was getting packed with files I was saving in the cloud, all because of how the Google Drive app was set up. It was mirroring my cloud files locally instead of streaming them, and changing that one bit helped reclaim around 60GB of storage almost instantly. Adding Google Drive to File Explorer was convenient until it wasn’t I didn’t realize it was duplicating my files Having Google Drive show up directly in File Explorer is genuinely one of the best things about the desktop app. Your files are right there alongside your local folders, you can drag and drop them, and the whole experience just feels native to Windows. The only thing is, if you’ve set Google Drive to Mirror mode without reading the fine print, it may be eating into your SSD’s storage. Mirror mode basically clones your entire Google Drive locally. Every document, every photo dump, every ZIP file you uploaded years ago — all of it gets stored on your PC locally. To be fair, this gives you the flexibility of accessing your files and folders even when you’re not connected to the internet or when the Google Drive app isn’t running. You can open, edit, and save those files offline as usual. And as soon as you’re back online, Google Drive sync changes. So if your Google Drive has 100GB of files, nearly all of it will end up on your SSD. The only exceptions will be Gmail attachments, Google Photos content, WhatsApp backups, and items in your trash. Everything else will be downloaded and kept on your PC regardless of whether you asked for it or not. My laptop only has 512 GB of storage, so having most of my Google Drive files mirrored makes things worse. I end up saving the same files on both my PC and the cloud, which means they take twice the storage. For me, this kind of defeats the whole purpose of using cloud storage. Switching to stream mode freed up 60GB of space Stream mode was the answer Once I realized Google Drive was taking around 60GB of storage on my SSD, the fix was simple. I went into Google Drive’s Preferences menu and switched to the Stream files option. This simple change flips the whole thing around. Instead of downloading everything to my SSD upfront, Google Drive now keeps my files in the cloud and only pulls them down when I actually open or access them. Google Drive still shows up in File Explorer like before, but nothing is physically sitting on my SSD until I actually open it. It’s more like streaming a YouTube video instead of downloading it. Doing this alone won’t free up storage space on your SSD, though. The next step is to close the Google Drive app and delete those mirrored files and folders manually. Just make sure everything is synced before you actually do this. Stream mode is great for saving space, but there’s an obvious trade-off. If you lose your internet connection, you won’t be able to access anything on your Google Drive. They’ll all show up in File Explorer, but since your Google Drive is a virtual folder at this point, you won’t be able to open anything offline. The files I use most are still available offline The best of both worlds The offline limitation of Google Drive’s Stream mode sounds worse than it actually is in practice. That’s because Google Drive has a feature that lets you mark specific files and folders for offline use. You can basically cherry-pick exactly what you need Google Drive to mirror instead of stream so that it’s always available on your PC. Of course, those offline files do take up physical storage on your SSD, but it’s way less than mirroring your entire Drive. So yes, you get the best of both worlds. Your rarely touched files stay in the cloud and remain available through streaming. But the important stuff you need daily remains downloaded and accessible regardless of your connection. It’s also quite easy to do. You simply need to browse through your Google Drive folder, right-click files you need mirrored, and choose Offline access > Available offline. Once it’s downloaded, its icon will change to a green checkmark so you can identify it easily. Everything else inside your Drive will have a cloud icon, meaning it’s available but needs a connection to load. You can reverse this at any point. Right-click a file and choose Offline access > Online only. You can even clear all offline files at once from Google Drive settings. Google Drive is a safe, free cloud storage service that lets you easily save, share, and work on your files and photos from any computer or phone.