6 Google Drive Hacks You Probably Don’t Know

Hidden Hack: Take Cloud Files On-the-Go

Google Drive has made it very easy to instantly pull up any files within your Drive from your Android or iPhone or tablet device. Just install the Drive app and anything in Drive on your desktop will also be available from your handheld device. The app allows you to view, move and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations even when you’re offline. To set offline access up, simply download a local copy of any file in Drive to your smartphone with the Keep On Device setting.

Hidden Hack: Protect Every Version of Any File

Google Drive maintains a version history of all the files in which you upload or create within the app—but only to a point. Older file versions are automatically deleted after 30 days or 100 revisions. This can be troubling for many business users. For example, what if you have a sales spreadsheet that is updated by multiple staffers every day? The way Drive is currently defaulted, you can easily lose a recent version of a document in short order.

Fortunately, there is a setting to fix this. You can mark individual Google Drive files to keep all the versions, no matter how old it is. This, of course, will have an impact on how much storage space you have in Google Drive. For this reason, you won’t find a global Drive setting to “keep all revisions forever”. For something like that, you need (ahem) a nice Google Drive backup product.