I received a notification from Google that I was nearly out of storage, so I started to clean up my Google Drive to free space so my Gmail wouldn’t stop working.

A hidden way to show all the files in your drive, sorted by size, is to click the text in the Storage section of the menu on the left (on a desktop browser).

I freed a lot of space by downloading the largest files in this list (mostly videos). As the list shrunk from 100s of MB per file to below 10s, all the items became photos living inside a Google Photos folder.

My guess is that although Google Photos was separated from Drive, the old Google Photos folder remains. Looking inside, I found this a plausible explanation, as the latest photos roughly coincided with the date Google had changed this system.

Given that this folder is essentially a duplicate of what’s in Google Photos anyway, it would save a lot of space to delete it. I downloaded it, and after waiting a while for the ~17 GB¹ to get zipped up and fired over the internet, it was on my local machine.

My plan was to add this to the Photo Library on my Mac, but in my experience the upload to iCloud would take days if not weeks, and I wanted to store the archive in a more accessible way.

I had been eyeing up Backblaze Backup for a while, and I noticed they also offer Cloud Storage with their B2 service (similar to AWS S3), and the first 10 GB is free.

I created an account, a B2 bucket, and installed their command line tool. After authenticating with my API key, I used it to upload the Google Photos ZIP I had downloaded from Google Drive.

So there you have it! I freed up the majority of space in my Google Drive, downloaded a bunch of my media and backed them up somewhere else.

Later on, I went further than this and downloaded all my Google Photos. That story has some interesting challenges and good learnings, coming up next.

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