Drive FAQ for admins

Yes. Drive is a place to store and access all your files, while Docs, Sheets, and Slides are types of web-based documents, as are Forms and Drawings. The suite of Google's web-based editors is referred to as Google Docs editors.

Similarly, Google My Maps are also web-based documents that you can create or share in Drive. Like Docs editors, My Maps can be used with or without Drive.

With Drive, your data is always backed up or stored in the cloud, so no matter what happens to your devices, your files are safe. You get the same business-grade data protection and security advantages that you get with G Suite, as described in G Suite security and privacy.

No. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and My Maps are found on your computer as files that are essentially just pointers to web documents. These small "pointer files" have Google extensions (such as .gdoc, .gsheet, and .gslides). If you open these files on your computer, they open in your browser where you can edit them online as usual.

For cloud-based Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms, you can enable offline access to Docs editors. My Maps aren't available offline.

With Backup and Sync, local files are always available offline. For example, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other files in your Google Drive folder that weren't created with Docs editors are available offline.

With Drive File Stream, you can make selected Drive files available for offline use.

If you need to blacklist the Drive File Stream cache from virus or backup software, exclude this directory:

• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\DriveFS
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS

You can optionally customize the cache location.

With Backup and Sync, local files (those not created with Docs editors or My Maps) still exist on your computer, as usual. Future changes to the local files will no longer sync as your computer won't be able to authenticate with Drive. Because Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms are stored in the cloud, you need your user name and password to access them.

With Drive File Stream, you need a valid Google Account to access all Drive files.

No. If you turn off the Drive service, this disables Docs editors as well as all Drive components (Drive on the web, Drive mobile apps, and Drive sync applications). 

Turning on Drive also turns on Docs editors. If you have the G Suite Essentials edition, you can turn off the ability to create new Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

• G Suite for Government: Drive search includes search over file titles, in addition to the operators listed here.
• All other editions of G Suite: Drive search includes full search over all file content, in addition to the operators listed here.

Any single folder in Drive which is not in a shared drive can have a maximum of 500,000 items placed within it. This limit does not apply to the root folder of 'My Drive'.

Items which are counted toward this limit are: 

• Folders
• Files
  • Any file you can store in Drive counts toward the limit.
  • Ownership of the file does not matter.
• Shortcuts 
  • A shortcut counts as a single item within a folder, even if the item it points to is not within that folder.

Example 1

This example shows how items are counted: Folder A counts as having 4 items and Folder B as having 2 items:

• My Drive (root)
  • Folder A (four items directly in this folder: Doc 1, Doc 2, Doc 3, Folder B)
    • Doc 1
    • Doc 2
    • Doc 3
    • Folder B (two items directly in this folder: Doc 4, Doc 5)
      • Doc 4
      • Doc 5

Example 2

This example shows that items placed directly in a folder count towards the 500,000 item limit, but items placed in child folders do not count towards the 500,000 limit for the parent folder.

• My Drive (root)
  • Folder C has 300,000 items directly placed in it
    • Folder D has 400,000 items directly placed in it
    • Folder E has 200,000 items directly placed it it

This example is permitted because there are fewer than 500,000 items in a single folder. Also note that in this example, Folder D and Folder E are each counted as 1 item toward the limit for Folder C.