Google Drive app for desktop is officially deprecated as of today, Google has 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 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 the standalone Google Drive and Google Photos Uploader apps.
On the enterprise side, Google has rolled out Drive File Streamer, 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 Streamer 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.
