How to move your Google Drive sync folder to another drive

Don’t want Google Drive to be synced to your C:/ drive? You can move it to another drive.

The downside is there seems to be no way to easily move it without having to re-download all the data again.

The default folder location where Google Drive stores information is “C:\Users\[computername]\Google Drive”. This is later referred to as the “old folder”.

  1. Right click the the “Google Drive” logo in your system tray. This is often on the bottom right corner of the screen.
  2. Click “Preferences”
  3. Select “Disconnect account” – this will stop the app syncing but your old files will still be on the computer.
  4. Right click the “Google Drive” logo in the system tray again
  5. Click “sign in” on the second page make sure you click “Advanced setup”
  6. Change the folder location to your new drive (not the folder must be empty)
  7. The files will now be re-downloaded from Google into the new location and your “Favorites” menu item will link to the new Google Drive location
  8. Before deleting the old folder I would recommend doing a file comparison using a tool like “Beyond Compare” as Google drive isn’t very good at syncing files sometimes – if you delete the old folder and don’t re-upload any files Google Drive has forgotten to sync in the old folder then you will lose them.

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  1. By antonyd

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