Google Drive now lets you pick which subfolders to sync on your PC or Mac

Google today announced that its Google Drive application for Mac and Windows in the next few days will let users start to make more granular choices about which folders should be kept in sync locally.

“Drive can store terabytes (upon terabytes), but there’s a good chance your computer’s hard drive will run out of space if you sync everything. Fortunately, you can now select which folders or subfolders you want to sync — and deselect the ones you don’t,” Google Drive product manager Aakash Sahney wrote in a blog post. “When you deselect a folder, it’ll be removed from your computer but still kept safely in Drive. And Drive shows you the size of each folder, so you’ll know how much space you’re freeing up.”

Deleting a file off of your PC could mean that people who you’ve shared the file with could lose access. So Google has created a new warning to make sure you know when that will happen.

Google Drive had more than 240 million users as of October 2014. Competitors include Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s OneDrive.

Today’s change is a bit reminiscent of how the Google Photos cloud-based photo storage app works — you can specifically select which folders on a given mobile device get backed up in the service, and when you’re getting close to filling up the storage on the device, the app tells you that and can delete those files locally.