Google Drive – How to Download a Google Drive Folder as a .zip

You can't zip single files, but if you download multiple files at once Google will zip all of the files.

Easiest option is to select your large file, then Ctrl+Click (Cmd+Click on Mac) on a second file, and right click either file and select "Download". Google will then take an astronomical amount of time to process the two files and eventually let you download a zip of the two files.

Use the open source command-line tool drive to sync the whole folder to your local hard disk recursively, downloading the contained files recursively instead of in one huge ZIP archive.

Use a command like this:

drive pull "Google Drive Folder Name to Download"

This will download only changes and new files, so a one-way sync from remote to local. It will ask for confirmation after presenting what would change.

Google Apps files (Google Docs, Google Sheets etc.) will be included only as *.desktop files with links to their online versions, since their native format is not accessible. However, you can also tell the command to include exported versions of Google Apps files (which it will do whenever detecting a new or changed Google Apps file):

drive pull -export=docx,xlsx,pptx,svg "Folder Name"

For more information, see drive help pull.