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How Do I Deploy Drive File Stream?

Deploy Drive File Stream to your organization for a quick and easy way to access your Drive files from your computer.

This article is for administrators. To learn how to use Drive File Stream, see the user Help Center.

How it works

With Drive File Stream, you stream your Drive files directly from the cloud to your Mac or PC, freeing up disk space and network bandwidth. Because Drive files are stored in the cloud, any changes you or your collaborators make are automatically updated everywhere. You’ll always have the latest version.

You can also make Drive files available for offline access. These cached files sync back to the cloud when you're online, so the latest version is available on all your devices.

Install or deploy Drive File Stream

  1. Verify that Drive File Stream will work for your organization. You can use Drive File Stream on these operating systems:
    • Windows: Windows 7 and up. Windows Server 2012 and up.
    • Mac: El Capitan (10.11) and up. For High Sierra (10.13) or newer, follow these steps.

    Also make sure to use a supported browser. 

  2. If you haven’t already done so, turn on sync for your organization. Make sure to allow Drive File Stream and specify whether users can see Drive File Stream download links.
  3. (Optional) At the same Admin console page where you turned on sync, check Allow users to enable real-time presence in Microsoft Office from Drive File Stream. This lets users see when someone is editing shared Microsoft Office files, and can help prevent editing conflicts.

  4. Install Drive File Stream on each user's computer using one of these options:

    • Let each user install Drive File Stream on their own machine. For this option, users need administrator rights to their computer. 

    • Download the Drive File Stream .exe file and deploy it in silent mode:

For Windows:

  1. Download GoogleDriveFSSetup.exe.
    Download now

  2. Run the installer in silent mode:
        GoogleDriveFSSetup --silent --desktop_shortcut

    The desktop_shortcut flag for Drive File Stream is optional. Users can also find Drive File Stream in the Windows Task Bar.

    Drive File Stream includes desktop shortcuts to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides by default. You can turn the Docs editors shortcuts off by adding the
    --gsuite_shortcuts=false parameter to the installer.

  3. (Recommended) Uninstall Backup and Sync in your organization.
  4. (Optional) Delete the Google Drive folder at \Users\%USER%\Google Drive. Use caution deleting this folder, as it may contain content that has not yet been saved or synced.

For Mac:

  1. Download GoogleDriveFileStream.dmg.
    Download now
  2. Run the installer in silent mode:
    hdiutil mount GoogleDriveFileStream.dmg; sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/Install\ Google\ Drive\ File\ Stream/GoogleDriveFileStream.pkg -target "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"; hdiutil unmount /Volumes/Install\ Google\ Drive\ File\ Stream/
  3. (Recommended) Delete the Backup and Sync applications.
  4. (Optional) Delete the Google Drive folder at ~/Google Drive. Use caution deleting this folder, as it may contain content that has not yet been saved or synced.

Drive File Stream comes packaged with Google Update (Windows) or Google Software Update (Mac) to automatically update Drive File Stream on your users’ computers. You can configure policy settings for these applications if you don't want Drive File Stream to automatically update.

If you have problems installing Drive File Stream, restart the computer where you're having trouble and try again.

Tip: As an administrator, you can find information about the Drive File Stream installation in the Admin console. You can verify the version number, last sync date, or the amount of offline data on a device.