External Storage - Best Practices and Options?

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Hi Glide Community,

I’d appreciate some guidance on the best long-term storage strategy for a new app we’re building on the Maker plan as a nonprofit.

App Context: The app is a document management system. The workflow is:

  1. Users upload policy documents (PDFs) via a File Picker.

  2. An admin approves the document.

  3. The approved document becomes available for other users to search and download.

The Challenge: We’re using Glide’s native storage, but I am concerned we will eventually exceed the 20 GB limit included in the Maker plan. We want to build this on a scalable foundation from the start.

My Research So Far: I’ve read some helpful forum posts about using Make (or Zapier) to watch for new file uploads and automatically copy them to a designated Google Drive folder. This seems like a viable workaround, but I was thinking there must be a simpler way to manage storage.

My Questions for the Community:

  1. Is the Make/Zapier-to-Google-Drive method the most reliable and recommended solution for our use case? Are there any hidden complexities with this, like managing download links back in the app once the file is in Google Drive? I was having trouble finding detailed guides

  2. Has anyone successfully purchased additional cloud storage directly from Glide while on a Maker plan? I want to confirm if this is an option before setting up an external integration.

  3. Are there any other clever solutions you’ve discovered for managing larger (50-100 gb) amounts of file storage?

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience and advice!

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Do you mean a direct link to download here, or you can just share the link to access the Drive file, and on the file’s link, they have the download button there?

I don’t have any info on the other two questions, I think it’s best to ask their Sales team.

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For example, a way for a user to use the native file picker to upload a file, but for it to be stored in a private google drive. I believe I read a couple posts maybe even by you depicting a solution utilizing Make as a solution for this. I just haven’t seen any resources from Glide or exact solutions for this.

Re: other questions. That’s a good idea, I will reach out to sales. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, my go-to solution for this is always use some sort of a workflow afterwards to send the file link to Make, then upload them somewhere and get the link/ID of the file back to show users in the app. Make sure you remove the original link afterwards so it qualifies for Glide deleting it from your storage.

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I would look into Amazon S3. I’ve not looked at pricing lately, but I believe it’s very affordable, and certainly reliable.

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