Step 2: Now go to My Laptop section on your left and use the drop down menu under Google Drive to select ‘Always remove both duplicates’.
Then click on the three-dot menu icon and select Preferences from the list. Hope this helps someone, and if anyone knows of a more efficient way to do this please do let me know.Stage 1: Click the Backup and Sync icon from the system tray. by typing L:\ in the File Explorer's address bar).Īgain, neither of these workarounds are optimal but at least it keeps your File Explorer clean. Note that the drive is only hidden above-water, you can still browse to it by other means (e.g. This is important because with the registry change above you're hiding a drive based on the drive letter, regardless of which drive it actually is. Step 1 prevents Google Drive from possibly getting assigned a new letter if you occasionally have removable media mounted (e.g.
Reboot your PC or fully sign out and in of Windows for the changes to take affect. Check the source link below for a table showing what value belongs to which drive letter The value differs depending on what drive letter you assigned to Google Drive. Name it "NoDrives" and hit enter ĭouble-click NoDrives to modify it, set it to Decimal, and fill in the value data. If you don't have a NoDrives DWORD in the window on the right, right click a blank area, click "new" and click "DWORD (32-bit) Value". Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer Open the Registry Editor (Win+R, type "regedit" and press enter) From the pull-down menu, change the Google Drive drive letter to something unlikely to ever be used, I chose "L" In the preferences window click the cogwheel again. Right click the Google Drive icon in the system tray and click the cogwheel. You can of course uncheck the "deny" checkbox in step 5 at any time if you wish to modify your Quick Access again. Personally I have a pretty static list of shortcuts that I want there so it's not a big deal. You won't be able to either pin or unpin any folders to it. The big downside to it is that it also prevents you from modifying the Quick Access. By denying write access to it, the Drive app (and anything else) won't have the proper permissions to add the shortcut to the Quick Access menu and thus fails in doing so. The f01 file is where windows stores the Quick Access list. At the bottom half of the window check "deny" next to the Write permissions. Right click that file and go to Properties, then go to the Security tab, and click the Edit button to change permissions Īt the top half of the window, under "group or user names", highlight "Administrators".
Locate the file that starts with "f01" (full name: tomaticDestinations-ms) Navigate to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations (This folder is hidden even if you have Hidden Items enabled, so copy this address and paste it in the File Explorer's address bar directly) Right click the Drive shortcut under Quick Access and unpin it They come with their own downsides, but they work for me and wanted to share the info for anyone who was as frustrated as I. So I made a custom Quick Access shortcut linking directly to my Drive folder, and managed to ultimately hide both the Quick Access shortcut the app creates and the virtual drive itself.ĭisclaimer: These are workarounds at best and not pretty by any means. So with this new app I now have two extra shortcuts in my File Explorer menu, both linking to yet another shortcut that links to the actual location I want to be in. If you use the Mirror Files sync setting, the only thing this virtual drive contains is a shortcut to the actual Drive folder on your pc elsewhere. boot your pc) - even if you had unpinned it before. Likewise, the app forcefully adds a Quick Access shortcut linking to the same virtual drive and re-adds it every time you launch the Drive program (or e.g. This app creates a virtual disk which is of course shown under This PC in Windows Explorer. Today, I was forced to switch from Backup & Sync to the new Google Drive for Desktop app.