7 ms·

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream. Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on E

by pedro2 5y ago

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream. Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen. An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: the configuration settings in Google Drive for Desktop was migrated to a JSON setting stored on a registry setting (just in case you try following the settings of Google Drive Filestream).

amatic 5y ago
In Everything, try going to options -> folders, and add the google my drive folder. Seems to be working for me
sumedh 5y ago
> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.
- deepsun 5y ago
  Promotions.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.
    - deepsun 5y ago
      My comment wasn't downvoted, it's actually my most upvoted comment on HN.
  - zomglings 5y ago
    I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user. Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase. In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder. Used to work at Google.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)
      - zomglings 5y ago
        I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google. For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon. The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development. Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.
judge2020 5y ago
I'm in the Drive for Desktop beta program and it combines the Backup & Sync functionality with Drive File stream, so you can sync 'My Drive' to any folder on your computer in addition to having a drive letter for file streaming. It also supports multi-account support. I've had some performance issues with it so it still needs work.
- buu700 5y ago
  I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    > I guess this doesn't help on Windows Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.
    - chupasaurus 5y ago
      NTFS/ReFS support symlinks if that's what you meant.
      - vagrantJin 5y ago
        > NTFS/ReFS support symlinks That's a better description actually. Windows 10 is too vague.
bushbaba 5y ago
This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring. And Drive is one of their enterprise products.
- kethinov 5y ago
  Ditto. The sudden inability to mount Google Drive to a folder instead of a separate volume in macOS finally got me to get off my ass and migrate to a self-hosted Nextcloud, something which honestly was pretty far down on my to-do list, so if Google hadn't made Google Drive so much more unusable out of nowhere then they could have continued harvesting data from me for who knows how much longer. They had to put in effort to lose me as a customer.
  - ecf 5y ago
    You won’t regret setting it up. I was hesitant at first as well but three years later with zero-downtime and 100% auto-update success I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 30 minutes administering it. Currently have it running on DO with daily droplet snapshots and it’s a nice reassurance that wherever happens, I can get back to a working state and never lose any data.
    - Toutouxc 5y ago
      The prices of block storage on DO are pretty steep, I'm seeing $50 a month for 500 GB..? Am I missing something?
      - ecf 5y ago
        My storage requirements are low and I’m currently using the 25gb or so of space that comes with the droplet. Unfortunately I can’t comment much on a Nextcloud setup with block storage.
      - benhurmarcel 5y ago
        There are cheap Nextcloud instance available elsewhere, such as Hetzner. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
contravariant 5y ago
I'd be happy if I could just stop it placing "desktop.ini" files in every fscking folder.

by pedro2 5y ago

amatic 5y ago

In Everything, try going to options -> folders, and add the google my drive folder. Seems to be working for me

sumedh 5y ago

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.

deepsun 5y ago
Promotions.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    My comment wasn't downvoted, it's actually my most upvoted comment on HN.
- zomglings 5y ago
  I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives. There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them. Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user. Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase. In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder. Used to work at Google.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)
    - zomglings 5y ago
      I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google. For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon. The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development. Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.

judge2020 5y ago

I'm in the Drive for Desktop beta program and it combines the Backup & Sync functionality with Drive File stream, so you can sync 'My Drive' to any folder on your computer in addition to having a drive letter for file streaming. It also supports multi-account support. I've had some performance issues with it so it still needs work.

buu700 5y ago
I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  > I guess this doesn't help on Windows Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.
  - chupasaurus 5y ago
    NTFS/ReFS support symlinks if that's what you meant.
    - vagrantJin 5y ago
      > NTFS/ReFS support symlinks That's a better description actually. Windows 10 is too vague.

bushbaba 5y ago

This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring. And Drive is one of their enterprise products.

kethinov 5y ago
Ditto. The sudden inability to mount Google Drive to a folder instead of a separate volume in macOS finally got me to get off my ass and migrate to a self-hosted Nextcloud, something which honestly was pretty far down on my to-do list, so if Google hadn't made Google Drive so much more unusable out of nowhere then they could have continued harvesting data from me for who knows how much longer. They had to put in effort to lose me as a customer.
- ecf 5y ago
  You won’t regret setting it up. I was hesitant at first as well but three years later with zero-downtime and 100% auto-update success I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 30 minutes administering it. Currently have it running on DO with daily droplet snapshots and it’s a nice reassurance that wherever happens, I can get back to a working state and never lose any data.
  - Toutouxc 5y ago
    The prices of block storage on DO are pretty steep, I'm seeing $50 a month for 500 GB..? Am I missing something?
    - ecf 5y ago
      My storage requirements are low and I’m currently using the 25gb or so of space that comes with the droplet. Unfortunately I can’t comment much on a Nextcloud setup with block storage.
    - benhurmarcel 5y ago
      There are cheap Nextcloud instance available elsewhere, such as Hetzner. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

contravariant 5y ago

I'd be happy if I could just stop it placing "desktop.ini" files in every fscking folder.