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
just like that pic.twitter.com/wcLnMRE1Qy
— Isaac Hepworth (@isaach) April 14, 2014
I have a little over 100Gb sync'd with Dropbox across three Macs. I figured it'd be a simple matter of
- ensure all three machines are fully sync'd with Dropbox
- quit the Dropbox app on each
- on Mac #1, copy the Dropbox folder to the Google Drive folder
- on Mac #1, fire up the Google Drive client, and sync (ie. upload the 100Gb)
- on Mac #2, copy the Dropbox folder to the Google Drive folder
- on Mac #2, fire up the Google Drive client, and sync (which should be a no-op)
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.jfc @googledrive#weeppic.twitter.com/2FNTwLBK7f
— Isaac Hepworth (@isaach) April 18, 2014
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.
…and five days later, switching back to dropbox. seriously surprised at some fundamental @googledrive limitations.
— Isaac Hepworth (@isaach) April 20, 2014
UPDATE: To my surprise the Google Drive Product lead tweeted an acknowledgment of the issue. Sounds like a fix is in the works.
@isaach Well dammit. Sorry you ran into this issue. Work in progress to fix. I'll ping this thread once it is rolled out.
— Scott Johnston (@happyinwater) April 21, 2014
2 comments:
Bittorrent Sync is working great for me. http://www.bittorrent.com/sync. You'll want a machine offsite, since it's not a cloud thing, but I kind of don't want my stuff in the cloud anyway, just accessible everywhere.
I'm a SugarSync user. While it's got its own warts, I like the fact that I can designate any folder to sync rather than being limited to one folder for all my stuff. So I can sync Documents, Pictures, Movies, etc. and still use whatever folder structure I want.
Bittorrent Sync sounds promising, but it's weird to have to leave all devices on all the time for it to work properly... I wonder if there's a version that I can throw onto an EC2 instance, so it's backed up to the cloud, but not someone else's service.
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