The Google Drive app for PC and Mac is being shut down in March

The aging Google Drive app for desktop is officially deprecated as of today, Google announced in a blog post. Support will be cut off on December 11th and the app will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018. Users who are still running the Drive app will start seeing notifications in October that it’s “going away,” and the company will steer customers towards one of two replacements depending on whether they’re a consumer or business user. Google Drive the service isn’t going anywhere. You can still access it from the web, smartphone apps, and either of the software options mentioned below.

Google now has two fairly new software tools for backing up your data and/or accessing files in the cloud. There’s Backup and Sync, the all-encompassing consumer app that replaces both the standalone Google Drive and Google Photos Uploader apps. It offers essentially the same functionality as Drive and works much the same way.

And on the enterprise side, Google has rolled out Drive File Stream, which saves space on your local drive while providing access to “all of your Google Drive files on demand, directly from your computer.” It’s a much more elegant and integrated approach. “Say goodbye to time-consuming file syncing and any concerns about disk space,” Google says of the benefits that Drive File Stream introduces.

There are some differences between the apps; both can do one or two things that the other can’t, so check out Google’s help pages to see which is the better fit. For most people the Backup and Sync option is probably it, though power users have complained about its lack of support for NAS drives.

---