Short answer: yes, you can back up a Mac to Google Drive. On its own, Drive syncs: one copy that follows you, and removing a file once removes it everywhere.
The space is still worth using. It needs a backup written into it, and there are two Google-specific traps to know about first.
Drive for desktop offers two modes, and the choice changes what is actually on your Mac.
If you are streaming, the copy on your Mac is a window onto Google's copy, not a second copy. There is exactly one of your data and Google is holding it. That is the opposite of what a backup is for.
You will find the mounted volume here, which is the path any tool needs:
ls ~/Library/CloudStorage/It shows up as [email protected], with My Drive inside it.
Drive keeps versions of uploaded files for 30 days or 100 versions, whichever comes first, and then starts discarding the oldest. You can mark an individual version "Keep forever", one file at a time, by hand.
Deleted files sit in Trash for 30 days and are then removed permanently.
Read that again with a backup in mind. A hundred versions sounds generous until you point a nightly job at it, at which point it is three months. And a thirty day floor means anything you did not notice within a month is not recoverable, which is the entire category of problem backups exist for.
This one catches people who think they have an archive and do not. A Google Doc, Sheet or Slide is not
a file. What appears in your Drive folder is a small .gdoc pointer, a few hundred bytes of
JSON containing a URL. Copy your whole Drive folder to an external disk and you have copied the pointers,
not the documents.
If those documents matter, export them. Google Takeout will convert a Drive to real formats, and that export is the thing worth backing up. It is a manual job, and it is the difference between an archive and a folder of dead links if Google ever closes the account.
Make an archive, encrypt it, write it into the Drive folder, and record what you wrote:
DRIVE=~/Library/CloudStorage/[email protected]/My\ Drive
tar -cJf - ~/Documents | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2 -out "$DRIVE/documents.tar.xz.enc"
shasum -a 256 "$DRIVE/documents.tar.xz.enc" > "$DRIVE/documents.sha256"Check it later with:
shasum -a 256 -c "$DRIVE/documents.sha256"In Mirror mode this works straightforwardly. In Stream mode be careful: reading the file back to hash it pulls the whole thing down again, which on a large archive is slow and, on a metered connection, expensive.
macOS gives no supported way to ask whether a file in a third-party cloud folder has finished uploading. The tick you see in Finder is drawn by Google's own File Provider extension and nothing else can read it.
So between writing a backup and it actually arriving, the copy is on your disk only, and no honest tool can tell you precisely when that changes. Copy Shelter reports the state it can actually establish, and counts only the copies it has verified.
A Google One plan you are already paying for is a perfectly good off-site destination, and off-site is the copy most people do not have. What it needs is a backup written into it. Live files pointed at it are a different thing.
Copy Shelter writes an encrypted, versioned repository into a folder like that one. Your files are unreadable to Google and to anybody who gets into your Google account, because everything is encrypted on the Mac with a key generated there and never transmitted. Deleting a file on your Mac does not remove it from the backup. Old versions stay until you decide otherwise. No counter reaching a hundred discards them. And the backup is read back and checked against its hashes on a schedule, so you find out about a problem on an ordinary Tuesday. Free for one location, and no storage bill from us, because the storage is yours.
My Drive/Copy Shelter.Not the whole Mac. Drive can hold your files and a backup of them, but it cannot hold apps and macOS in a form you could restore a Mac from.
It is a good off-site place for a backup. Drive on its own keeps old versions for 30 days or 100 versions, so it needs a backup tool writing versions into it to cover more than that.
No. It is sync. Deleting a file on your Mac removes it from Drive and from every other device signed in. Version history covers 30 days or 100 versions, whichever runs out first, which is a safety net for a mistake you notice quickly.
For backup purposes, Mirror, because Stream means most of your Drive is not on your Mac and there is only one copy of it. Mirror costs the disk space. If space is the reason you chose Stream, that is a sign the data needs a real backup destination.
Because they are not documents, they are pointers. A .gdoc file is a few hundred bytes of JSON with a URL in it. Backing up your Drive folder backs up the pointers. Use Google Takeout to export real files if those documents matter.
Thirty days or 100 versions, whichever is reached first. Individual versions can be marked to keep forever, one at a time, by hand. Trash holds deleted files for 30 days.
Yes, and it is the only way the contents stay yours. Encrypting by hand with tar and openssl works. The limitation is that one archive with one passphrase has to come down in full to get a single file out of it, which is what a proper repository format solves.
Yes. A deduplicated and compressed backup is usually smaller than the files it protects, but it is not free, and it shares the quota with your Gmail and Google Photos.
Related: Dropbox, Proton Drive, iCloud Drive, and checking a backup is readable.