Google has been providing 15GB of free cloud storage space with Google Drive, but not many of us are making good use of it. If you need suggestions, then you can use the free storage space to backup your important files or even store music files in it and stream it to your Android phone. But there’s an even better use to that space than the ways i have specified now.
The most appropriate use of this storage space would be to download and store web files directly from the internet. This method can come very handy when you cant save web files locally, suh as if you are using the internet connection at your college or workplace. In a situation like this, most of us would save the download link and download the file later. However you can save the file to your cloud storage instead.
This has become possible thanks to a extension for Google Chrome known as Ballloon. With Ballloon installed on Chrome, you will be able to right click on any download links or files on a webpage and save them to your desired cloud storage service.
Ballloon supports the following cloud storage services: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Copy and SugarSync. Since I primarily use Google drive for cloud storage, I am going to guide you through the entire process of installing and using Ballloon to save web files to my Google drive storage.
How to Save Web Files to your Cloud Storage with Ballloon
- Step 1: Install Ballloon on Chrome from the download link provided at the bottom of this page.
- Step 2: Once Installed Ballloon will appear in Chrome’s extension bar. Click on Ballloon logo and click on Sign in with Google.
- Step 3: Login to your Google account.
- Step 4: Authorize ballloon to access your Google drive storage.
- Step 5: You can now click on any download link or file on a web page and select Save link to > Google Drive to save the file to your google drive storage. Alternatively if you place the mouse cursor over image files, you will be able to see logos of cloud storage services. You can click on any of these logos to send the files to the respective cloud storage.
- Step 6: You can click on the Ballloon extension and select the third circle at the bottom of the menu to see the progress of the saved files.
All the files will be saved in the Ballloon folder in your respective cloud storage services. Further, files will be stored in categorized folders. For example image files will be stored in the images folder inside the ballloon folder.
Ballloon comes with support for cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Copy and SugarSync. However you would have to authorize balloon to access your cloud storage services the first time you try to use each of the supported cloud storage services.
In the above instructions, I have showed how you can save web files to your google drive storage. Incase you would like to save web files to another cloud storage service, you would have to repeat the instructions from step 2 onwards and provide Ballloon access to the respective online storage service. This needs to be done only the first time you need to activate support for a new cloud storage service.
Download: Ballloon for Chrome
