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Apps & uninstalling

How to Uninstall Google Drive From Your Mac (Properly)

Remove Google Drive for desktop from your Mac including the File Provider mount, login items, and the cached files in ~/Library.

8 min read

Google Drive on Mac has gone through three names in five years: Backup and Sync, Drive File Stream, and now “Google Drive for desktop.” The current app uses macOS’s File Provider API to mount your Drive as a virtual folder at ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<email>/, with files streamed on demand. It’s a clean architecture, but uninstalling has a few extra steps because of the File Provider integration.

Here’s the full removal on macOS Sonoma 14 and Sequoia 15.

Make sure you have local copies of important files

Drive’s “stream files” mode means most of your files are placeholders, not actual data. Opening a file downloads it on demand. After uninstalling, those placeholders become broken aliases — you lose access to anything that wasn’t already cached locally.

Before uninstalling:

  1. Open the Google Drive folder in Finder (look for the cloud icon in the sidebar, or navigate to ~/Library/CloudStorage/).
  2. Identify any folders or files you absolutely need offline access to.
  3. Right-click → “Make available offline” (or download via drive.google.com to a non-Drive folder).

If you have plenty of disk space, the simplest move is to right-click the entire Drive folder and choose “Make available offline” for everything — wait for the download to finish before continuing.

Alternatively, if you have terabytes in Drive and don’t want to download all of it, just download what you actually need now. Anything in your Drive cloud is still accessible at drive.google.com.

Tip: If you used Drive's "Mirror files" mode (the alternative to "Stream files"), all your files are already local in ~/Google Drive/ or wherever you set the mirror folder. Uninstalling won't lose any data — the folder just becomes regular files.

Sign out and quit

Click the Drive icon in the menu bar → Settings (gear icon) → Preferences → Settings tab → “Disconnect account.” Confirm.

This signs you out and removes the cloud mount. Your local cache stays for now.

Then quit: gear menu → Quit Google Drive.

In Activity Monitor, search “Google Drive” — kill anything left running, including:

  • Google Drive — main app
  • Google Drive Helper — Electron helper
  • gsync — older sync daemon (if Backup and Sync legacy is still around)

Drag Google Drive to the Trash

Open Finder → Applications. Drag “Google Drive” to the Trash. The app bundle is around 280 MB.

If you also have “Backup and Sync from Google” or “Drive File Stream” (the older names) in Applications, drag those too. They’re all separate bundles.

Where Google Drive stores data

The current app’s bundle ID is com.google.drivefs. Storage paths:

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/ — sync database, account info, settings
  • ~/Library/Caches/com.google.drivefs/ — image cache
  • ~/Library/Group Containers/com.google.drive/ — shared with extensions
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.drivefs.plist — preferences
  • ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.google.drivefs.savedState/ — window state
  • ~/Library/Logs/Google/DriveFS/ — diagnostic logs (often massive — DriveFS logs verbosely)
  • ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<your-email>/ — File Provider mount point

System-level files:

  • /Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/ — system-level support
  • /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/google_drive_fs_* — crash reports

For the older Backup and Sync (com.google.GoogleDrive):

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Drive/
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.GoogleDrive.plist

For Drive File Stream (com.google.drivefilestream):

  • ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS/ — same path as current app
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.google.drivefilestream.plist

Open Finder, Shift+Cmd+G, paste each, and clear what’s there.

The Logs folder under ~/Library/Logs/Google/DriveFS/ is often surprisingly large — I’ve seen 500 MB of diagnostic logs on a Mac that had Drive installed for two years. Always worth deleting.

Skip the manual huntSweep finds every leftover preference, cache, and support file in seconds. Download Sweep free →

File Provider extension cleanup

This is the part that catches people. The File Provider extension registration sticks around after uninstall.

  1. System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions.
  2. Scroll to “Extensions” section, click File Provider.
  3. Find Google Drive in the list. Toggle it off if present.

If you don’t see it, it’s already cleaned up. If the toggle is stuck or grayed out, reboot — File Provider extensions sometimes need a restart to fully unregister.

Verify from Terminal:

pluginkit -m | grep -i google

Anything Drive-related still listed means the extension hasn’t fully unregistered. A reboot fixes this.

The CloudStorage mount point

After uninstall, the mount point at ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<email>/ may linger as an empty folder or broken alias. Clean it up:

rm -rf ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-*

The wildcard catches mounts for multiple Google accounts if you had more than one.

If you also had iCloud, OneDrive, or Box mounted via CloudStorage, those still work — only the Drive ones are removed.

Login items and background

  1. System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions.
  2. Remove Google Drive entries from “Open at Login” and “Allow in the Background.”

These should clear after uninstall but sometimes linger.

Let Sweep uninstall properlyDrag-to-trash leaves traces. Sweep wipes the app + support files + prefs + caches + helpers all at once. Get Sweep free →

Keychain cleanup

Google Drive stores OAuth refresh tokens in the Keychain.

  1. Open Keychain Access.
  2. Search “Google Drive” and “drivefs.”
  3. Delete matching entries.

You can leave general Google entries alone (those are used by Chrome, Gmail in browser, etc.). Just delete the Drive-specific ones.

Empty the Trash and reboot

Empty the Trash. Reboot. The reboot is non-optional here because of the File Provider extension — without it, you might see broken Drive folders in Finder or a leftover menu bar icon.

After reboot, verify:

  • No Google Drive icon in the menu bar
  • No Drive entries in System Settings → Login Items
  • ~/Library/CloudStorage/ is empty (or only contains other cloud services)
  • pluginkit -m | grep -i google returns nothing

Recovered space

The app and its caches are usually 500 MB to 1.5 GB. The big number depends on how much you’d downloaded for offline access — that can be tens or hundreds of GB.

If you used “Mirror files” mode, the entire mirror folder is on your disk and was the size of your Drive (or whatever subset you mirrored).

Manual vs. Sweep

Google Drive is moderately complex to uninstall:

  1. Three potential bundle IDs (DriveFS, Backup and Sync, Drive File Stream)
  2. File Provider extension registration to clean up
  3. Multiple Library paths including the giant Logs folder
  4. CloudStorage mount point cleanup

Sweep handles the bundle IDs and Library paths in one pass. The File Provider extension and CloudStorage cleanup are still manual either way (because they require System Settings access for the extension, and Terminal for the mount point).

If you’ve cycled through all three Drive variants over the years, Sweep is faster — it’ll catch leftover Backup and Sync data you forgot was still on your Mac.

Reinstalling

If you go back to Drive, download from google.com/drive/download. The current “Google Drive for desktop” app installs cleanly. You’ll choose stream vs. mirror mode again, sign in to your Google account, and your Drive remounts. None of the old caches need to be preserved — they were just cache.

That’s Drive fully removed. Your files are still in the cloud at drive.google.com; your Mac is one File Provider lighter; your ~/Library is a few hundred MB cleaner.

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