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Google’s Backup and Sync desktop app is for Mac and Windows after. Users now have the power to sync up anything, including photos and videos from cameras, SD cards, and USB devices, instead of their files remaining stuck in one place. It’s a way to protect files and photos by backing them up, as long as they’re in Google Drive and Google Photos, primarily for consumer users. Business users of G Suite are recommended to keep using Google Drive until a business-focused solution called Drive File Stream comes out later this year. People can sign up for Drive File Stream’s early adopter program though. Google wrote on its blog, “Just choose the folders you want to back up, and we’ll take care of the rest.” Backup and Sync is available through Google Drive and Google Photos for download.
Google Desktop for Mac OS X Released by Apr 4, 2007 - 6:40 AM CST. Finally, one less reason to use my Windows laptop at work.
Late last night, Google released the long-awaited Mac OS X version of their popular Google Desktop application, enabling Mac users to break away from and use the familiar Google interface to search local documents, e-mail, Web history and GMail archives from their Web browser. While the PC version, out for more than 30 months already, is more full-featured, including Widgets and a Dock-like news sidebar, the Mac version of Google Desktop offers the same level of index and search functionality. Available from page, the software is, as you would expect, very easy to get going., expand it and click the application installer. The Google Updater application will download the needed application, and start the process of indexing. In addition to installing in your Applications folder, Google Desktop offers you a menubar icon and the option of installing in the Dock. Then, the app really goes to work, crawling your local hard drive as if it were the World Wide Web. Almost three hours into the process, my own PowerBook hard drive is still crunching away, and the index reports more than 50,000 files are indexed so far.
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But from the very first file, you can search from Google Desktop – either by hitting the Command key twice in succession to bring up a floating app bar, or by selecting “Open Desktop Homepage” from the menubar icon. The desktop homepage button looks like Google.com, only with your Desktop being one of the available resources to query. Instead of search results from Web sites around the globe, Google Desktop segments your own local results into categories of “E-mail”, “Web history”, “files”, “media” and “other”. In the two-plus years I’ve used the PC version, e-mail is 90% of what I search, with “files” taking the other 10%. Of course, that’s mainly because Microsoft Outlook doesn’t have the excellent search functionality already present in Apple’s Mail, and tons of.PST fields can be a beast, but I digress. For me, I find Spotlight isn’t as intuitive as Google Desktop, and keyword searching is comparatively arduous.
Google Desktop for the Mac is one of the very few applications available for Windows and not Mac that I’d really wanted, and it’s finally here., and you’ll wonder how you functioned without it. I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand why there is a need to replace Spotlight.
I’m a recent switcher myself and I find Spotlight a huge improvement over anything I had ever used on Windows including Google Desktop. I now use both Spotlight and Quicksilver. I use spotlight pretty much to find a file and show me it’s path without actually opening up a finder window. I know there is probably a way to do it with Quicksilver, but I’m still a little new with QS.
I guess I don’t understand this need to have tools that were on Windows on the Mac since I want to distance myself as far away from the Micorosoft/Windows world as I possibly can. Kevin – Google are positioning it as complementary to both Quicksilver and Spotlight, but it seems to be more a Spotlight replacement than anything else. The only thing it has in common with QS is launching apps/files, really.
One rather major flaw: it’s taking an absolute age to index my files – I installed it about three hours ago, and it’s only indexed 2,000 or so files, so it’s not much use as yet! Another flaw: it installs an input manager for all users, when I’d much prefer to keep stuff like that /Library/InputManagers/ (not to mention that input managers are a bit iffy, generally speaking).