Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive

blog.google

64 pointseknight1571 comments

What surprises me most is the fact that there seems to be very little interest in meta syncing. I have far more files to store than there is capacity on my SSD, and yet, most of the cloud storage providers seem to offer only full or selective sync capabilities.

What I would like to have is the ability to browse my entire file repository and "pin" certain files to make sure I can have the most critical stuff offline, while other files would be streamed when I need them.

I kind of hoped that SpaceMonkey (now Vivint Smart Drive) would be the answer for me and have one sitting right here. It's a a pretty cool device in theory, but in practice, it is extremely slow, backed by a company that could not care less about the product it has acquired.

Then there is Dropbox Smart Sync. This seems promising, but only is available for business users. I don't have any experiences with it.

Still looking for one single product to this right. Am I the only one frustrated with this?

Look into Drive File Stream.

Looks interesting! Any pointers on how one could actually get it though? :)

At this moment it seems only available for business users who opt in for the early adopter program.

Source: https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-fs-eap.html

From the sound of it they're only going to make it available to business/enterprise customers. Ouch. Happy about it for my gsuite account but not so much for my personal account.

I think Microsoft rolled this out as standard for OneDrive in a version of Windows (8? 8.1?), only to revert the change due to customer confusion.

They're bringing it back: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/onedr...

It's supposed to come back (improved) with the Fall Creators Update though. I can see how many users would get confused by it but hopefully this time it'll be more intuitive.

Same here.

iCloud comes very close, but it's horribly unreliable, and there is no way to keep it from delete certain files you might still be working with.

I had gigabytes to spare, and it deleted a pretty big file while I had it open in Photoshop, I couldn't figure out why Photoshop wouldn't save it, and it was because iCloud had deleted it while I was using it.

Now, it's been stuck at uploading 200 files/200 for about a week.

How did that even happen? Had you not saved the file recently? iCloud chooses what to delete based on size and last access. If you were working on the file and had saved it at least once, it would be impossible for it to delete it.

Opening the file at all should update the 'last accessed' time, no save required.

Google photos on android does this to some degree. It suggests cleaning up space by deleting all backed up photos. You can pin photos to keep them on the phone.

I got an S8 in April and between 4k video and shooting in raw I was able to hit 40 gigs a few weeks ago. It is nice to be able to have it all stored off the phone at full rez.

I did have one issue over the 4th. I visited family who did not have wifi and had a heated ceiling which consisted of a few thousand feet of copper cabling. We were 2000ft from a 4g tower but the wires made a decent faraday cage so I had to go outside to show them family photos. I doubt anyone will have the same issue but it did show me what the photos app would feel like without cell data.

Best I have figured out so far is owncloud plus resilio sync pro and then host it yourself. The former gives you Dropbox UI and apps and the latter gives you meta sync wherever you need it.

git-annex ftw. All files are visible, and you can selectively "get" them from a remote node (including cloud storage), and then drop them from local storage when you're done. There's no file streaming, though, you have to download them upfront.

iCloud does this and, in my experience, it's been pretty good about it. I have yet to run into a file that I needed that wasn't already downloaded locally. Since it uses files based on timestamps, it does it reliably. The only thing it's missing is the ability to lock a file so that it's always available, regardless of last access time/date.

Does it have the ability to 'unsync' a file? IE: if a large file is on iCloud drive, will I be able to remove it from my local disk?

This is confusing in so many ways

1. They give no mention of how this handles existing installs of Google Drive or Google Photos Backup.

2. The application has the exact same name for Google Photos and Google Drive. Do I need to download and install both? I tried that, but couldn't move the second to my applications directory without overwriting the first. Looking at the downloads they're the same size, so I'm guessing they're the same, but that begs the question, why the two download links in the blog?

3. Where will photos be saved? I save mine in Google Drive, and choose the option to sync to Google Photos. Will they be stored directly on Google Photos? Because I'd rather keep them on Drive.

I'm still a huge fan of both products, and hope that this cleans up a number of integration issues between both services, but this announcement feels like it wasn't thought through at all.

1. If you have Google Drive for PC/Mac installed, it will update it to Backup and Sync.

2. The difference in the two endpoints are the defaults selected during the setup wizard (which you can change from either). The Photos versions is geared more towards Photos users and the Drive users more towards Drive.

3. They are saved in Drive, and are synced to Photos. However if you delete in either Drive or Photos cloud, it will affect the other. Whether it is deleted from your hard drive depends on what you have selected in the deletion settings portion.

Very helpful reply, thank you. However, I still believe they should have outlined this in their Help Center rather than have users figure it out by trial and error.

How does that work given that a google Photos has different pricing for compressed photos?

It utilizes similar pricing for photos and videos.

You can elect to upload Photos/Videos in High Quality (which does not consume quota).

This is so confusing. What's that? A replacement, an addition? Will this clutter up my photos? It's like an invitation to: Try it out to find out what it really does and if it clutters up your photo stream... deal with it.

Update: oh the blog actually writes it is an replacement. Great... now I don't know if this works in any way with Insync in parallel :(

That happened to me the first time I checked the option to sync my Drive photos to Google Photos a couple of years ago. I had random work and school related graphics and photos jammed into my Photos library for a looooong time (and there was no "undo").

Exactly! "We've made a whole bunch of really great assumptions. Can you guess what they are? Why not experiment with your precious data and find out!"

If only Google Drive's app actually worked reliably (see the discussion from the day before yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732023 -- "It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me") this might be worth trying out.

Since they can't even reliably sync the Drive folders they claim they can, who would trust their "backup" of the rest of the system?

Just like the discussion in that post, that user is such a far out edge case that it's just flat out disingenuous to say that the Google Drive app doesn't work reliably. It's not perfect, but it works for 99.9% of the people using it. 700,000 files at more than 2TB is not the typical use case for Google Drive.

The backup case is of the same scale as the original poster's situation.

My team found it unreliable for much smaller directories as well. 6 people, 6 independently unhappy with it. It was only on a conference call when we realized we were looking at different copies of files that we all complained of the same symptoms. Anecdote rather than data, I admit, but it's disturbing that each of us silently assumed we were the only ones having trouble.

(FWIW we stuck to google for realtime shared docs, but moved to DB for general file storage, including spreadsheets and presentations)

I really hope this update will sort out the lack of meta data regarding which photos the Photo app compressed during upload. Even with the "Original" option set, the Android app would silently(!) switch to the compressed form, then happily tell you to delete the originals to save space(!!). I now have a random mix of photos both on Drive, Photos and copied over USB to my HDD but haven't found the time to unpick this schmozzle. I'm a paying customer.

<sarcasm>Maybe one day soon we'll see an official Linux client.</sarcasm>

Ok but which Linux? Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? etc... Which desktop should they integrate with? Gnome? KDE?

I suppose they could go the Steam route and only support Ubuntu, but then that would be Ubuntu support, not really Linux support. It would be nice to have at least some support on Linux for sure, but unfortunately deciding to support Linux isn't an answer to a question, it's opening a whole extra big bag full of knotty questions.

Until that issue gets sorted out in Linux land, providing first class Linux support in any professional, commercial grade application or service is going to be problematic.

Insync is a Google Drive client that has been "providing first class Linux support in any professional, commercial grade application" for years. Also, what do desktop environments have to do with Google Drive clients?

I've already been doing this by pointing "My Documents" to ~/Google Drive/Documents, so I guess this just simplifies the process for everyone else.

(I mean, Drive already has versioning, so this adds... an explicit form of versioning?)

Oh, and where's our Linux client?! Gnome's Drive support is awful. It just locks up Nautilus half the time.

Still, no linux client.

I am mystified as to why Google keeps ignoring Linux especially for Drive. Don't a non-trivial number of Google employees run Linux? It also rules out Drive for company wide deployment if any of the people are using Linux, since they will be excluded.

That is one thing Dropbox at least gets right.

Linux marketshare is around 1.5%, and I'd speculate those choosing Linux tend to be less willing to trust google/the cloud with their data than average.

It's just not worth it when the best-case outcome is indistinguishable from a rounding error,

You are talking about individual deployments where plain market share is reasonable. I'm talking about group deployments where multiple people need to work together. In that case the solution has to work for everyone.

If memory serves, Google runs a custom build of Ubuntu which they've never released--probably due to licensing with Canonical. My guess would be that the Linux Google Drive client may, too, have some restricted licensing. We do know they have one, however:

http://www.webupd8.org/2015/01/official-google-drive-linux-c...

Can someone explain what this adds over Google Drive? More importantly, is it taking anything away? The blog post sure didn't provide that necessary info.

Looks like this allows you to select folders outside of the Google Drive folder to sync into the cloud without moving then into the Drive folder.

If it's backup, it should not work the same way: deletions should not be synced for example.

You can elect not to sync deletions in the new application.

I was a little confused at first. As the announcement says, this is a complete replacement for the existing Drive app. No idea why they thought it was a good idea to rename it (and to use the same name for a separate application for Photos...).

I ran the install, and it appears that the main difference (other than UI) is that you can easily add other folders from your computer to your Drive now.

Or the google photos uploader? Backup and sync?

It doesn't take anything away from the current Google Drive client. It adds more features such as adding more folders to sync, choosing whether the images in those folders get synced to Google Photos, adding USB media support, and deletion options.

It also has a lot of bug fixes over the older client.

Because Google Photos does not have an Android TV app, I periodically do a full Google Takeout to pull all my images so that I may rsync newer ones over to my NAS so that they appear in Plex and my wife can then view them on the Google TV.

Can you stop reinventing things that already exist, and perhaps fix things that are real customer pain points.

Like not being able to view Photos on an Android TV, like not being able to use Google Drive or even this new Backup and Sync on Linux... or the big one, the fact that GSuite accounts are crippled and the majority of new products cannot be used by those with GSuite accounts or can only be used in a severely crippled way.

These "real customer pain points" seem pretty specific and isolated to me.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/play/86WVa8b_...

1,022 comments about a single aspect of the G Suite account restriction, relating to a single Google product (Play Music)... in this 1 thread alone.

Doesn't seem that specific and isolated to me.

3 million paying g-suite "businesses" (Assume 3 customers per business as that's the minimum and you have 9 million accounts) and 1000 comments? Or 0.03% of customers or 0.01% of accounts.

Seems pretty specific and isolated to me.

Don't for a moment think I don't agree with that though. I am a paying g-suite user for my family and would love to have access to family sharing. But I do recognise that I am in a minority.

It's not going to be easy to just put Google Photos on Android TV. Android TV has no concept of accounts or privacy so the only way it could really work right now is to either open up the entire user's photos to anyone currently using the TV or invent some sort of hard to use scheme such as only displaying photos "tagged" a certain way as public/tv which most people probably won't do. Or they could ask for a PIN each time which is annoying.

Solving that issue is going to take a re-work of the Android TV user experience. A lot of apps have this problem such as Drive, Dropbox, Docs, etc. There's no current way to have an app with personal data be usable on a public device like a TV.

>or the big one, the fact that GSuite accounts are crippled and the majority of new products cannot be used by those with GSuite accounts or can only be used in a severely crippled way.

You have to remember that GSuite, as an app for businesses and education, has a lot more restraints and big hairy legal and ethical issues for every single feature than the consumer versions of the apps. Each thing Google makes needs to be looked at from a very different angle and lots of decisions have to be made for it to be made available for business use. The use cases are very different. Money is handled differently. Lots of access controls need to be created for admins in each app available in GSuite. It's not a trivial amount of work.

Can you cast photos from the Photos app in your phone?

Yes. Which makes sense because you are actively sharing them and can end the display whenever you want. No privacy issues.

Sounds like the appropriate solution for OP's use case of the wife looking at them on the TV.

If Google Photos is the primary ingestion engine for you, you could do this (a suggestion):

1. Go to Drive online. Go to Settings

2. Enable "Create a Google Photos folder"

3. Download the Backup and Sync client, and sync Google Photos to a place on your computer.

4. Periodically have rsync copy new files to your NAS via a scheduler.

My current workflow for backing up photos on Linux is:

1. Copy photos from memory card to a NAS. 2. Upload the photos to Google drive using skicka.

I've got a script to simplify this, so in reality the workflow just consists of inserting the memory card and running the script. The photos then appear in Google Photos fairly quickly afterwards. I use this for both jpg and nef. I've been pretty impressed with how good Photos is at handling nef files.

Skicka: https://github.com/google/skicka

I bought some extra space from Google for photos (which I have backed up in many places), my credit card didn't work for some reason, and they immediately downgraded my account to the free tier, with no warning.

It might have been because there were actually no files taking up the extra space, but losing all my pictures because my CC didn't work and they don't have their $1.99 or being paranoid that that might happen is not worth it.

The behavior in this case is that new uploads are blocked but your existing files remain.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en "If you cancel your storage plan or when your storage plan expires, your storage limits will reset to the free levels for each product at the end of your billing cycle. Everything in Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail will still be accessible, but you won't be able to create or add anything new over the free storage limit. If you reach or exceed the free storage limit"

Ah, that would make me a lot more confident.

Don't a lot of people archive terabytes of stuff and just leave after 1 month, though?

Gmail would refuse to recieve mail until you either free up space or upgrade. They share the same storage space.

>You probably keep your most important files and photos in different places—your computer, your phone, various SD cards, and that digital camera you use from time to time. It can be a challenge to keep all these things safe, backed up, and organized, so today we're introducing Backup and Sync. It's a simpler, speedier and more reliable way to protect the files and photos that mean the most to you. This new tool replaces the existing Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for Mac/PC.

This actually describe the problem a lot of people have without providing a solution. Uploading, Syncing doesn't fix this. How are we going to sort and manage all these files that are scattered in difference medium in the first place? Do we Copy all of them to our PC / Mac? And then Manually sort through all these files, before uploading to Google Cloud?

What if my 256/ 512 GB SSD couldn't fit all these files I have laying around? How am i support to sort through all these files over the last decade if i dont have them stored in the first place?

My biggest problem with Google Drive is its pricing. Why is your 1TB $100/year, when pretty much every major competitor charges $60?

$100/yr would buy me 5TB with Microsoft OneDrive.

Even Apple, which usually has crazy margins on everything, gives you 2TB for $10/month.

If that extra $40 a year causes them to not shut it down so fast, I'm all for it :)

For anyone running the macOS high Sierra beta, don't install this yet. I installed it, but it refuses to sync anything on (1) an APFS drive or (2) a network share. The error dialog says it requires HFS+.

Why is Photos still not a public API?

I'm happy to pay for the storage but I need a Linux client. I'd write one myself with a song in my heart, but Google keeps obfuscating this stuff for no good reason.

I wonder, how reliable is mounting a regular server via a sshfs connection? I sometime do it to edit static websites and it works.

Does it still not count photos above a certain megapixel count towards the free space?

Let's not kid ourselves. This is Google trying to fill up your account so you will purchase extra space sooner.

Are you insinuating their storage offers are offers for storage? That sounds like quite the conspiracy.

> Backup and Sync is an app for Mac and PC that backs up files and photos safely in Google Drive and Google Photos, so they're no longer trapped on your computer and other devices.

Yeah, they only become trapped on Google's servers.

I dont get what's new here or am i confused?

I have used many services over the years, OneDrive from Microsoft, Google Drive / Photo sync thing, dropbox, Amazon storage, etc.

Honestly being that I work at Microsoft I am obviously going to have a bias a bit, but this stuff is not about my work its about my life and how to stay synced across my Windows Phone, Windows 10 devices (i have a few), my iPhone, my iPad, etc. and the best way i have found to do all of that is with OneDrive.

Hold on, i know what you're thinking that im just picking my companies product, but honestly i tried them all, a lot over the years and OneDrive just does a great job, has first class apps for iOS, Android, Windows and powerful Web UI for when i just need to jump in and find something.

Also you get 5 gigs for free with OneDrive. Move up to 50GB and its $1.99/mo.

On top of that I use an Office 365 subscription for my personal life (custom domain/email) and again i get a ton more storage through that.

Really worth giving it a try!

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/

Got a Linux client?

As a non-MS employee, I'd call OneDrive "fine". After several years, I haven't seen anything to suggest that it's better.

I'm not sure why you're confused. It's laid out pretty directly in TFA.

> This new tool replaces the existing Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for Mac/PC.

I won't trust OneDrive after they cancelled their unlimited plans. Yes, I understand it's unrealistic for such a thing to exist but Microsoft offered it anyway, then took it away when people actually used it.

Plus having it forced on me through Windows makes me instantly hate it.

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