Many laughed at Google when they introduced their mostly-online operating system, Chrome OS. We could see it was a way to offer a clean and lightweight OS for those who only need access to the internet with their computer. However, a lot of people felt it was useless because of it's online-only access to the various services Google has to offer. Over time it has grown into more of a full-featured OS with the integration of Android apps, support for Linux apps, and more. Now we have learned that a new update allows the user to make an entire Google Drive folder available when the device is offline.
More and more people are coming online for the first time every day now but there are times when we simply do not have access to the internet. The severity of this issue will depend on where you live and the stability of your internet provider but the case still stands. We see internet outages happening in the most developed countries, so no place is immune to the issue. This can be a big issue with Chrome OS needing to be online to access files and data from Google's plethora of services.
A big request from users has been the ability to make the contents of a Google Drive folder available offline. Sure, you can manually download individual files and folders within Chrome OS, but doing this every time a change is made to a folder can be tedious. Thanks to a post over on the Chrome OS subreddit, we have learned that Google is adding support to make the contents of a Google Drive folder available even when the device is offline. We aren't aware exactly when this was first introduced but the Reddit user says they found this in their beta build of version 73.0.3683.32 of Chrome OS.
Simply go into the Google Drive page and right-click the folder you want to be made available offline. You should see an "Available Offline" option to choose from if you're on this build. Once enabled, the Chrome OS device will then sync changes of this online folder to your local storage at regular intervals. However, upon further testing, we discovered that this is only a one-way feature. Meaning, changes made to the online folder will happen to the offline folder. But as you are browsing in the offline folder you are not able to perform actions including cutting, deleting, pasting, or renaming files in the offline folder (you can also not create a new folder in this offline folder).
