The client app of Google Drive comes with the ability to sync specific folders on computer to be backed up to the cloud. This feature is pretty handy if you have some important files and you want to back them up to Google Drive. Thanks to this feature, you don’t need to manually upload those files to Google Drive.

Before syncing certain folders on your computer with Google Drive, make sure you have installed the client app of Google Drive on your computer and connected it with your Google Drive account. You can check this post if you haven’t done it already.

At the time of writing, the official client app of Google Drive itself is only available for Windows and Mac. Google hasn’t released the official client app of Google Drive for Linux and there is no sign the company will do so in the near future. Assuming that you have installed Google Drive on your computer, click the icon of Google Drive client on the system tray. Click the three-dot icon on the left-most and select Preferences.

On the Preferences window dialog, click the CHOOSE FOLDER button and select the local folder you want to backup to Google Drive and click the OK button.

Once you hit the OK button, the Google Drive client will start syncing the selected folders. You can sync multiple folders, but you can only select a single folder per folder selection. So, if you want to sync several folders you need to select them individually.

Access the synced folders on Google Drive

To access the local folders you have synced, you can login to Google Drive on web. On the Google Drive dashboard, click the Computers menu and double click the My Laptop folder.

You should see the local folders you have selected here.

Final thought

The ability of syncing local folders to the cloud offered by Google Drive client app is pretty handy to backup important files. Every change you make on the selected folders — like updating the contained files or adding new files — will always be synced as long as you don’t pause the syncing process. This feature is pretty handy if you are a student who is working on a final project. You can take advantage of this feature to automatically backup the final project-related files just in case something bad is happen to your computer.