How to Use Gmail and Google Drive Offline

- Today on Dotto Tech I would like to talk to you about ways to use Gmail or Google Drive when one is not connected to the internet. Offline access to your Google stuff today on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doin' this fine day? At Dotto Tech we make technology easy, so you can do more. And what we're gonna do more of today is get more work done when we don't have access to the internet. Now, admittedly, that's a increasingly rare situation, when you don't have access to WIFI or mobility, but it does happen, and I wanna show you first of all how to access your Gmail, and then how to access all of your Google Drive data when you are not connected to the internet. And there's some pretty simple things you have to do, and I wish there was just one universal place, one universal place we could all go to to manage all of this, but alas, that is not the case. So let's begin with Gmail. Now, as far as your Gmail is concerned, on your smartphone you always have about the last 30 days of email synced to your phone, so you've got access to it even when you're offline on your phone for the most part. On your desktop, however, you have to go under your Settings menu here and look in the top menu along the top and you will find Offline access right here. See Offline? You click on that and it's easy peasy, you click Enable offline email. And at that point there, it will then sync the last whatever period of days of email you wanna have stored on your computer, stored on your computer. Now this doesn't give you an archive of all of your old email, no. This is for the current emails. So 30 days, 7 days, or 90 days. Once you've chosen that, you can also choose whether or not you wanna download all of the attachments. In some cases the attachments can take up a lot of storage space, so you might not want to have the attachments stored locally, or you might choose to have the attachments stored locally. Completely your choice. Once you've done that and you've enabled everything, you then have to make sure, as is always the case in Google, that you oh, we have to... After logging out of my Google account. Oh, let me read the security settings. Just a minute. Oh, well I'm gonna choose Keep offline data on my computer. And then, once I save the changes, we are done. Offline not recommended for shared devices. Okay, Emails will remain on this device until offline mail is disabled. This is obviously important if you are on a public computer. If you're on a computer that you share with others, that is the issue. I only use this computer, so I'm comfortable doing it, just storing the offline data, which means I don't have to re-sync everything afterwards. Now let's head over and let's take a look at the story in Google Drive, which is a slightly different scenario. Now in Google Drive there are two places that you can actually set up offline access. One is for Google's word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, the tools that we used to call Google Docs. For that there's an extension, which gives you access to your docs offline. For everything else, because we can also use Google Drive to store photos, to store other files or other documents that aren't part of the docs family. For those we have to set up a sync utility that will actually sync those documents separately from within Google Drive. So it gets a little big confusing, I can understand, but basically there's two places. And actually, you see here right at the bottom it says, "Get Backup and Sync for Mac" and it's also the same utility for Windows. So that's gonna allow us to get all of our other documents, which I will show you in a minute, but first lets go in the browser into our Settings and let's go check our extensions and make sure that we're set up for accessing offline data. In our Settings, we're gonna be looking for this extension, or you can download it from the Chrome Store. It's Google Docs Offline. It has to be turned on and enabled on your computer. Once you've set up offline access in your browser, you can go into Google Drive, go under Settings, and there you can manage the offline access. Do you see here that you've got Offline, Sync Google Docs, Sheets, Slides & Drawings to this computer so you can edit them offline. And there you can turn it on or off manually here, as well as through the extension, so this gives you access to the control from the Settings panel as well as from the Extensions panel. Now, let's talk about all of our other documents that we might want to store in Google Drive. I'd like to take a few moments and talk to you about the Google Drive Backup and Sync Utility, which is an application that you can download for either Windows or Mac that allows you to manage Google Drive as well and how it syncs all of your documents. Now this isn't necessarily relevant in how it manages Google Docs, the word processing spreadsheet files, etc., getting access to them when you're offline. But it is relevant in that it manages how Google Drive stores and where it stores all of the other files that you choose to use and store in Google Drive. When you install this utility, it installs as a system utility and if we go in to the Preferences after it's been installed, and I've installed it here, you can see that you can choose where different files live within Google Drive, how much space they take up, and you can determine if you want them backed up to the web or if you want to sync them to other devices. So this is a tool you should download and learn how to use because it becomes a really valuable ally in backing up and syncing all of your files that are in Google Drive; not necessarily just the files that are part of the old Google Docs Suite. Before we wrap things up, I wanna talk to you a little bit more about mobile access and using Google Drive on your smartphone, because the phone deals with offline access to documents differently. Now as far as your Gmail goes, it will sync the last 30 days or so of email, so you're fine as far as that goes, but in order to manage your documents within Drive, this is what you should do. You choose any document that you want to have access to when you are not online. So, say when you're on the plane and you wanna work on a letter on your phone, what you do is you open that document on the smartphone in Google Drive, and then you tap on the little three dots on the right hand side. There if we scroll down, we can make this document available offline. So that means that now it's being stored in the resident on the smartphone. Now you wanna be judicious about how you do this, because obviously it takes up room on your phone, and our phone is one area where we don't wanna have a lot of superfluous files floating about taking up space because we use our phone for so many other things and they typically have rather limited amount of storage. However, when it's an important document that you do wanna work on, and you are not gonna be online and have online access, this is a really easy way for before you leave, before you end up being offline, you can choose to access those documents so you can work on those documents. Then when you are online again, your version will sync with the cloud version of that document as well. So that's how we manage it on our smartphones. The same in both IOS and Android, as far as that's concerned. Now before we wrap up, if you've not yet subscribed to our channel, what are you waiting for? Please, subscribe and make sure you ring the notification bell. And if you've got a little bit of time on your hands, why not check out one of our other videos? Until next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun stormin' a castle.