Saturday, April 19, 2014

Dropbox and Google Drive

UPDATED 4/21: update below from Scott Johnston, Product lead for Google Drive.

I figured it was time to move from Dropbox to Google Drive. On the face of it, it's deceptively easy

I have a little over 100Gb sync'd with Dropbox across three Macs. I figured it'd be a simple matter of

  1. ensure all three machines are fully sync'd with Dropbox
  2. quit the Dropbox app on each
  3. on Mac #1, copy the Dropbox folder to the Google Drive folder
  4. on Mac #1, fire up the Google Drive client, and sync (ie. upload the 100Gb)
  5. on Mac #2, copy the Dropbox folder to the Google Drive folder
  6. on Mac #2, fire up the Google Drive client, and sync (which should be a no-op)
and then the same for Mac #3.

Everything was looking good to begin with. Even step 4, which some had said would be troublesome, worked just fine in practice—speedy upload, no problem. The real surprise was step 6:

because Google Drive was downloading an entire duplicate copy of everything, not noticing that I already had a complete copy in the local folder already.

Obviously this is fucked up. It's also, apparently, a known issue. And while I can probably live with the lack of LAN Sync, and the general unpolishedness of the Google Drive client, basic functional brokenness like this is a deal-breaker.

From a number of people I've heard great things about the Insync client for Google Drive—including its support for multiple Google Accounts. For now, though, I'm heading back to Dropbox.

UPDATE: To my surprise the Google Drive Product lead tweeted an acknowledgment of the issue. Sounds like a fix is in the works.

Posted by at 22:05 2 comments
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