Google Drive for desktop will be discontinued in March 2018

Google has officially announced that it will stop supporting Google Drive for Mac / PC and then it will remove the application early next year, welcoming a new storage and sync service.

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The Google Drive application released in April 2012 allows users to keep files, photos and other media synchronized across multiple devices. According to the official announcement from Google, Google Drive will no longer be supported from December 11, 2017 and then officially discontinued on March 12, 2018. Drive's successor is Backup and Sync , launched in March 2017, and a completely new app with various features called Drive File Stream .

Google discontinued the Drive app for Mac and PC

Google made the announcement via a blog post promoting the new Drive File Stream app that provides access to files similar to OneDrive On Demand:

"With this launch, Google Drive for Mac/PC has been officially deprecated. It will no longer be supported starting December 11, 2017, and it will be completely removed on March 12 2018. We encourage you to use Drive File Stream. As an alternative or supplement to installing Drive File Stream, you can upgrade to the new version of Drive for Mac/PC, called Backup and Sycn" .

A few important things to note:

• In October, Drive for Mac/PC users may start receiving notifications from the product that Drive for Mac/PC is officially being removed.
• If users launch both Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync on the same machine, they will receive a prompt to stop syncing My Drive with Backup and Sync to save drive space.
• Team Drive editors will not be able to edit files on their Team Drive when they are open in Drive File Stream; They will only be able to view them. To edit these files, they will need to open the file in Drive on the web.

One of the most touted benefits of Google Backup and Sync is the ability to back up everything. You will have 15 GB of space provided for free to use. Users can always upgrade for additional capacity, starting at $1.99/month for 100 GB or 1 TB for $9.99/month.

Over the past few months, there have been a lot of announcements regarding hosting services. In late August, CrashPlan announced it was "dismantling" its home backup service, while Microsoft said in an article that a future feature update would remove support for legacy backup tools. like File History and System Image . It seems that the industry is being restructured with many great new alternatives.