feather drive

does google drive take up space on your mac?

by sumit paul · last updated october 31, 2026

yes, and how much depends on the mode. in mirror mode, google drive for desktop keeps a full copy of your my drive on your mac, so it uses as much space as those files take in the cloud. in stream mode, files stay in the cloud and take almost nothing until you open one; then the whole file downloads and stays on your mac, so the space grows the more you use it.

stream vs mirror, for disk space

	stream files	mirror files
space on your mac	small at first, grows with every file you open or keep offline	the full size of your my drive
opening a file	downloads the whole file, then opens it	opens straight from your disk
offline	only files you've opened or made available offline	everything in my drive
where files show up	google drive under locations in finder's sidebar	a folder on your mac
shared drives	streamed	still streamed (google only mirrors my drive)

google's own help puts it simply: streaming uses very little local space but needs a reliable connection, and mirroring keeps a full copy on your computer and in the cloud. the full comparison is in google drive stream vs mirror.

where the space goes in stream mode

on macos 12.1 and later, drive for desktop streams through apple's file provider system. that changes where things live:

files you've opened. they're stored in ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-you@gmail.com (your own address). google says the location is controlled by macos and can't be changed, and that on newer macos versions macos manages this cache, so you can't set a size limit for it.
files you made available offline. these stay downloaded on purpose. a whole folder marked offline can be tens of gigabytes.
offline edits. anything you change without a connection stays in the cache until it uploads.
the app's own data. ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS holds drive for desktop's settings and file database, plus its lost and found folder for files that failed to sync.

the last two are why you shouldn't delete those folders by hand. they can hold work that only exists on your mac.

the part that surprises people is the first one. a 4 GB video opened once from stream mode is a 4 GB file on your mac afterwards. open a few shoots, or point a photo or music library at your drive, and stream mode quietly ends up close to mirror mode.

how to check how much space google drive uses

click the drive for desktop icon in the menu bar, click the gear, then offline files. google says this lists the files available offline and shows how your disk space is used.
for exact numbers, open terminal and run:
```
du -sh ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-*
du -sh "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS"
```
du counts what is actually on disk, so files that haven't been downloaded count as zero even though finder lists them at full size.
in mirror mode, check the size of your mirrored folder with get info (⌘I) in finder. that's roughly what it uses.

how to get the space back

remove downloads you don't need. in finder, control-click a file or folder in google drive and choose remove download. the file stays in your google drive; only the local copy goes.
turn off offline for big folders. anything you pinned as available offline will stay on your mac until you undo that.
switch mirror to stream. google's order is: make sure everything has finished syncing, switch to stream files in preferences, close drive for desktop, then delete the old mirrored folder. delete it only after the sync has finished.
reset the cache by disconnecting and reconnecting the account, as a last resort. google warns that this removes offline files and anything in lost and found, so read how to clear the google drive cache on a mac first.

what you can't do in stream mode is open a big file without it landing on your disk. that's how drive for desktop works: it downloads the whole file, then hands it to the app.

if it's the big files that fill your mac

for large videos, raw photos and archives there's another approach. feather drive puts google drive and dropbox in finder as a drive and fetches only the parts of a file an app actually reads, so files take zero bytes on disk and the pieces it has read sit in a small cache whose size you set. in this side-by-side test a 1.22 GB video opened in 1.7 s from feather drive and after 1 min 44 s from google drive for desktop, which downloaded all of it first.

the limits are real: it needs macos 26 or later and a connection to open files, it's a paid app with a 3-day free trial, and it only sees the files you put in it, not your whole google drive. the two run fine side by side: drive for desktop for everyday documents, feather drive for the big files.

common questions

does google drive stream mode take up space on a mac?

a little at first, then more as you use it. every file you open downloads in full and stays on your mac until macos clears it or you remove the download, and files you mark available offline stay for good.

does google drive take up space on my mac or in my google storage?

both, separately. files you own in google drive count toward your google storage either way. on your mac, mirror mode uses the full size of my drive and stream mode uses only what you've opened or kept offline.

if i delete google drive from my mac, are my files deleted?

removing the drive for desktop app doesn't delete the files in your google drive. deleting files inside the google drive location in finder does, because that change syncs to the cloud.

why is google drive using so much space when it's set to stream?

usually because you opened large files, marked folders available offline, or an app such as a photo or music library read through whole folders. each of those downloads full files. check settings › offline files in drive for desktop to see what's kept.