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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I had my machine backed up to Google Drive using their Backup and Sync program and when I got a new machine there was no reasonable way to restore the data from the old machine to the new machine, using Google Drive. Sure I can copy data from my old machine, but what if ti was lost or stolen? If the app can't handle this use case, what's the point of it? The only way to restore the files is in small chunks using the web based interface - not reasonable for tens of thousands of files and hundreds of gigabytes.

The workaround was to back everything up to the "Google Drive" folder since this seems to be the only folder that Backup and Sync can actually restore.

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Had a somewhat similar issue, but with Drive File Stream.

At one point I set it up to use my second SSD as the local storage. Then I needed that SSD elsewhere, so I just took it out. It was impossible to restart the damn thing. It kept complaining about missing folders. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, but it kept its settings.

Since I barely used that machine, if ever, and I'm not particularly familiar with Windows, I never really looked into how to completely clean up the configuration. But the point is that there clearly are some pretty stupid decisions about some products.

For future reference, most windows apps keep their settings in the AppData/Roaming folder in your user folder. There's a useful shortcut as an env variable - type %APPDATA% into explorer to go straight there.

System-wide settings and state should be stored in C:\ProgramData.

To be fair it is called Backup and Sync not Backup, Sync and Restore.

But on a more useful note how I have handled this in the past is to download the complete Google Drive data using Google Takeout. Not the greatest solution but it has worked.

It should be implied that if you are backing up files at some point you might like to restore them

Are you saying the files were no longer available in Google Drive? Did you download the Drive for desktop client to try restoring files or just try reinstalling the Backup and Sync client?

The files were still in Google Drive under "My Computer". My attempt was the latter, reinstalling the Backup and Sync client.

I believe simply installing the Google Drive for Desktop client would have been what you wanted to do. As the name suggests, the Backup and Sync client is well primarily for backing up and syncing your data automatically to Google Drive and Google Photos.

Thanks for the tip! I'll check that out

There are better Google Drive clients like SyncDocs that can actually restore properly.

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