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Currently Drive just places a small json shim file on the disk, rather than syncing a usable document.

If you use Chrome its easy to get Drive to store docs locally (but not images pdfs etc) [1]

Chrome will only store a few items locally, and often you still need a network connection.

If you use Syncdocs [1], it syncs all docs locally as Word or Open Office files. It also syncs other files and Google calendars.

I use insync[1], it also converts all documents, but why I use it mostly is it's linux support.

An advantage to Syncdocs is it's one time payment, instead of a subscription fee.