How To View Folder Size for Google Drive Folders

Google Drive is a fantastic place to store your files, with highly generous free plans and large storage capacity with the paid plans. It synchronizes files across devices and allows users to share and collaborate files. Google Drive is perfect for those who constantly work on the go, as the application is accessible on multiple devices and software.

Some of the pros of using Google drive include:

• Auto Save – In Google drive, all your work is automatically saved, so you won’t ever lose a piece of work again!
• Device Compatibility – You can share files on different devices easily.
• Offline Access – Despite being primarily an online workspace, users can still access their files even when offline.
• Sharing and Collaboration – Users can share files with other users online.

Although there are other players in the cloud storage marketplace, including OneDrive (Microsoft), Dropbox, and Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive is above the rest for the amount of storage provided. Google Drives gives free 15 GB of personal/business file storage, with 2 TB business plans costing $12/month. Even additional storage plans are available when using Google One for people with immense storage needs.

Regardless of storage space limits, you may need to free some space up in your Google Drive account occasionally. Maybe you have a lot of personal videos and photos to store, or you may not be willing to pay a monthly subscription and just want to stick to your 15 GB of free storage.

Regardless, when you need to get that storage organized and slimmed down, you’ll find that Google Drive is a bit feature-light in the area of file management. Specifically, it’s impossible within the Google Drive web interface to find out how big each folder is. You can look at individual file sizes, but the total size of the folder is a mystery.

Nonetheless, getting a folder’s size information in Drive is possible. Let’s get started.

Quick Fix: Are You Just Looking For Big Files?

If you’re just looking for significantly sized files so you can clear them out, there’s a quick workaround that will let you skip the rest of this article.

1. Go to “Google Drive.”
2. Click the “gear icon” in the upper right corner.
   
3. Click “Settings.”
   
4. Click “View items taking up storage.”

Google Drive will then display a list of every file in your cloud, automatically sorted by file size. You can then decide whether you want to keep those big files, save them somewhere else, or delete them.

Download the Drive Folder to View Its Size

The brute-force approach is simple: download the Google Drive folder to your local hard drive. From the downloaded folder, you can view storage size details for the downloaded folder in File Explorer, then delete the whole folder when it is no longer needed.

To download a Google Drive folder, follow these steps:

1.  Click My Drive on the left of the Google Drive page to expand a list of folders.
2. Right-click a folder and select “Download” to save a copy to your hard drive.
   
3. When you select that option, a “Preparing download” bar opens at the bottom right corner of Google Drive. This notification tells you that it is zipping the file. It will let you know when it is ready to download, and the folder’s ZIP file will save to your browser’s default download folder.
4. Open the downloaded Google Drive folder in File Explorer. Since it saves as a compressed ZIP file, you should extract it first by opening the ZIP and pressing “Extract all.” Select a destination path for the extracted folder, and press the “Extract” button.
   
5. Right-click the extracted folder in File Explorer and select “Properties” to open the Properties window. The “General tab” includes folder size details. You can right-click the folder if you’re finished and select “Delete.”
   

Add the Backup and Sync app to view Drive Folder Size

Backup and Sync is an app that syncs Google Drive cloud storage with your hard disk. It displays all of your Google Drive files and folders within a Google Drive File Explorer folder. Since it shows the cloud storage folders in File Explorer, you can view Google Drive folder sizes in Windows’ native file manager by installing Backup and Sync on your computer.

To add Backup and Sync to Windows, click the “Download” button here. That will save the software’s installer to your hard drive. Open the software’s installer to add Backup and Sync to Windows. The installer will walk you through three steps to get you set up.

1. Sign in to your “Google Account.” Make sure this is the Google Account associated with your Google Drive account.
2. The following window will ask you which folders you want to back up to Google Drive from your PC. You can select a few folders to back up by clicking “Choose Folder,” but you do not have to. To skip this step, de-select all folders and press “Next.”
3. The third step is the one you desire. The “Sync My Drive to this computer” option gets selected by default. The default place for your Google Drive folder to be backed up to locally is your user directory; you can choose an alternative one by clicking “Path.”
4. Select “Sync only these folders…” to display a list of all the folders in your Google Drive. The folder size will be displayed next to each folder. While this is not an easy way to check folder size every time, it is a great one-off solution that does not require you to install anything on your computer. If you have the information you need, quit the wizard. Otherwise, press “Start” to begin syncing Google Drive with your hard drive.

File Explorer will now include a Google Drive folder, which you can open by clicking “Quick access > Google Drive.” File Explorer’s “Size” column does not include any folder storage size details in the main display, but you can check a folder’s size by hovering the cursor over a folder to open its tooltip.

Want more room on your Google Drive? Check out this tutorial on how to free up Google Drive space.