Google GDrive In Windows Explorer

Have you ever thought of using Gmail’s generous amount of space as a hard drive? With over 7GB of storage now we can use all that extra storage as a online hard drive. Much like a regular hard drive, you will be able to create folders, and copy, save or retrieve them from the Gmail drive and you will be able to access the file from anywhere with just an internet connection. The Gmail Drive is a free drive application that creates a virtual file-system in Windows Explorer, enabling you to use Gmail as an online hard drive. It literally creates an additional drive for your PC, under your My Computer folder. You will then be able to save, delete and retrieve files directly from your Windows Explorer. Read on to find out how.

How To Create Gmail As A Hard Drive

To create Gmail as an online hard drive you must have a Gmail account  to do so. If you don’t have an account follow the steps mentioned below;

Create Gmail Account

Goto www.gmail.com and click on the Sign Up For Google Mail link.

Enter the required information as name, password etc and click I accept, Create My Account.

And you are done creating your account. The next step would be to create a link between Windows Explorer and Gmail.

Link The Account To Windows Explorer In My Computer

Logon to your Gmail account and Click the Create a Filter button next to the Search the Web button.

In the next dialogue box, type GMAILFS in the subject because the files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in Gmail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to your archived mail folder.

Check the Skip the Inbox (Archive it) option and Click Create Filter.

Now the account is ready to be linked with Windows Explorer My Computer.

Link Your Gmail Account With My Computer

Download the shell extension from here. When the download is complete, extract the contents of the zip file to a folder and run setup.exe.

When the files are installed, you will see a new drive icon in the My Computer as Gmail Drive. You can now store files by copy and pasting or right-clicking the desired file and going to Send to and clicking on Gmail drive.

Alternate Application – RoamDrive

Gmail Drive is not the only application available online for this purpose, you can also use RoamDrive which is also a drive shell extension and RoamDrive also allows you to store more than the standard 10 MB by breaking larger files into smaller pieces.

Create A filter

After creating your account on Gmail if you don’t have one, as mentioned above, Logon to Gmail account and click on Create A Filter link.

In the Subject field type ROAMDRIVE and click next, Check the option Skip the Inbox ( Achieve it ) option in the next dialogue box, and Click Create Filter.

Link Your Gmail With My Computer

Now you need to download RoamDrive from http://www.roamdrive.com. download the utility, Run the setup.exe program the exact same way you ran Gmail Drive.

Once RoamDrive is installed, you can use your Gmail account to store files.

Start using your free online disk space and if any question pops up do let us know !