Can I Use Google Drive For Mac Without Keeping Files On My Computer

Use Google Drive as a backup tool without sync files to my Google Drive folder on my Mac. To a backup folder on my own Google Drive without it synking all the pictures to my Google Drive folder on my computer? So I basically want to have them stored 'in the cloud' but not synced to my local google drive folder on my computer.

While Sam's method should work, Jan's right. The whole point of Dropbox is to synchronise the data on your device(s) and on the cloud. It is not designed to be an upload service. If you merely want to 'offload' data from your hard drive to the net, you should get a different service, as Dropbox is relatively expensive and not designed for this job. That said, something about the way you frame the question suggests to me that there is a different issue at play here. Hard disc space if very cheap nowadays.

Certainly much cheaper than cloud storage. The point of (expensive) cloud storage is to offer a safe backup (that is, a copy) of your data. If your hard drive is too small for your photos (unusual in itself), the best thing to do would be to buy an external hard drive and store the photos there.

You could then back that up to the cloud if you so wished. In any event, the computer's memory is a separate electronic component which is quite independent of the hard drive and will not get 'bogged down' by the drive's contents. A computer can get bogged down because of a large number of folders and files on a hard drive.

Microsoft just loves to cache file data and is reluctant to release it. This is one of the reasons that CPU power is not as important on file servers than the amount of RAM. Users who have a lot of files like photos that are in a small number of folders that are accessed frequently will see heavy RAM usage and if Microsoft's caching algorithm decides to drop them from the cache, it will see heavy IO usage when it goes to reload any of those folders, thus bogging down the entire system. So if this isn't merely a hard drive space issue, but an overall system performance issue, OP may see better performance by splitting folders with a large number of photos into multiple folders with fewer photos in each. It should reduce both RAM usage and IO operations. Anything you remove from the Dropbox folder locally will be removed from the Dropbox cloud storage too.

Only by disabling the Dropbox app you can remove things without having an impact on the cloud storage. But then again, it won't upload stuff you put in either. Dropbox is primarily considered a cloud synchronization and backup service. So changes you make locally are reflected to the cloud storage and vise versa. Can i receover my cache for a website in chrome on a mac download. If you just want to use it for hosting your pictures without having them on your hard drive I suggest to remove the application from your system and upload them using the Dropbox website.