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Comment by hs86 | Hacker News Reader

What is the deal with Google's syncing apps?

"Backup and Sync" still misses features like Files On-Demand/Smart Sync available in OneDrive/Dropbox and deleting files online pollutes the local trash/recycle bin on macOS/Window computers.

"Drive File Stream" actually has these lazily loaded file placeholders, but it is treated like an additionally mounted volume instead of a local folder somewhere on my local disks. It also managed to occupy over 60 GiB RAM for over a week during its initial sync which had lots of small files created by Arq Backup.

It seems like 'unlimited' cloud storage is foremostly limited by the performance characteristics of their sync clients.

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I made the mistake of copying a node project I was working on.... holy cow does Backup and Sync choke on all those tiny JavaScript files.

It started syncing and just couldn't stop.

I had to delete or move all the Backup and Sync contents across my devices to get to 0 before it quit endlessly thrashing.

Dropbox still has the best sync tech and is the only one that can handle deep and numerous file hierarchies. The rest have better pricing and integrations like email/productivity apps.

Can confirm. I have to move all my node projects to Dropbox for this particular reason.

Are you putting `node_modules` in cloud storage?

Yes. I knew you could use git and install modules on each end separately, but putting the whole thing in sync is just more convenient for some personal toy projects.

Thanks for the tip!

Actually, Resilio is not any slower than Dropbox. Syncthing is also faster thans any commercial offering I ever tried. Even Nextcloud sync is fast after an initial init.

What exactly are you referring to? Upload speed? That's not the issue.

Dropbox is the best at crawling a very complex directory structure with millions of files and diffing it efficiently with the server and other clients, and then transferring all the individual changes. Nothing else comes close. And their write-ups show the work involved:

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-en...

Indexing. Dropbox is slower than Resilio in my experience, and for shares with 100k-1M files, many small.

But also throughput is good.

On my laptop (an old Ultrabook), GDrive Sync and Backup will literally take 30+ minutes on "process files" (while using 30% cpu and high disk I/O) every time I reboot.

Also its UI (IIRC written in Python) often fails to load (give you a blank box).

They even have a ~~missing features~~ comparison page:

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7638428?hl=en

They've gotten way too enterprise, and I mean that in the worst way possible. Cloud files should always follow the "don't make me think" philosophy and a feature comparison matrix is the polar opposite of that. I guess it's time to look at Dropbox.

I switched to Google Drive a while back because I really wanted better photo storage and Dropbox killed that off a while back, plus the Google One account is pretty nice. But I had no idea that Google would be so horrible at syncing files. It's really amazing how poor it is compared to Dropbox.

Dropbox has spent a decade on solving a single problem and that shows in the product experience, even though it's more costly and has less extra features like email and productivity apps.

Their blog posts explain why they're so much better:

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-en...

I did the same, and then it really just wasn't a great tool. And backing out of a fully populated Google Drive was a complex process.

Is there even an officially supported Linux client from Google?

Nope. Wine?- have not tried. Nautilus has some integration, which is mostly not usable.

I've been pretty satisfied with InSync.

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