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Google Drive

The Basics

Google Drive is a fantastic resource for faculty, staff and students to save and back up all of your files. Many people think of Google Drive as the place where your Google Docs, Sheets and Slides live, but you can also store any kind of file: pictures, videos, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentation filesÑÇÖÞÉ«°É¦ Any kind of file that you want!

Google Drive also makes collaborating on files much easier. Every file and folder in Drive can be marked so others can view, can comment on, or can edit. No more emailing files to yourself or others, and no more trying to track down the newest "version" of a file!

Download Google Drive for Desktop

You already know that you can go to to manage your files in Drive, but there's another option as well. You can download Google Drive for Desktop (formerly known as "Drive File Stream") to make a folder on your computer called "Google Drive." Anything that you add, remove, or move into these folders will be backed up and synced to the Google Drive website automatically! This works especially well if you want access to your files on multiple devices.

You can download Google Drive for Desktop by clicking the Settings gear at the top of Google Drive and clicking "Get Drive for Desktop".

If you have any questions, please reach out to the CIT Help Desk via email or x7670.

Shared Drives

Every file in Google Drive is owned by a single account. While the owner can list others as able to view or edit the file, if the owner leaves the college, all of their files are deleted.

To help solve this problem, faculty and staff of Hope College now have access to departmental Shared Drives. Files that are added to a Shared Drive are no longer owned by a single account, but become owned by the Drive itself. This means that if a colleague retires or moves departments, the files that they added to the Shared Drive aren't affected.

To get to a Shared Drive, look in the left sidebar under "My Drive" for the section called "Shared drives".

Every file you add to a Shared Drive is immediately available to everyone that is part of the Shared Drive. If you have previously shared a file to users outside of the Shared Drive and you then move that file into the Shared Drive, it will lose its previous sharing settings and become available only to those who are in the Shared Drive.

You can add any file to a Shared Drive in which you are the owner. You can select one or multiple files and move them over via drag-and-drop, or right-clicking and selecting "Move to." Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to move a whole folder to a Shared Drive; You'll have to recreate folder hierarchy and move over files over folder-by-folder. We hope this feature becomes available soon.

Quotas

Everyone at Hope College shares a limited amount of 1Hope Account storage space. In order to make sure that no single account uses all of the storage, each accout has a maximum storage limit.