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Comment by pedro2 | Hacker News Reader

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream.

Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen.

An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: the configuration settings in Google Drive for Desktop was migrated to a JSON setting stored on a registry setting (just in case you try following the settings of Google Drive Filestream).

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This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring.

And Drive is one of their enterprise products.

Ditto. The sudden inability to mount Google Drive to a folder instead of a separate volume in macOS finally got me to get off my ass and migrate to a self-hosted Nextcloud, something which honestly was pretty far down on my to-do list, so if Google hadn't made Google Drive so much more unusable out of nowhere then they could have continued harvesting data from me for who knows how much longer. They had to put in effort to lose me as a customer.

You won’t regret setting it up. I was hesitant at first as well but three years later with zero-downtime and 100% auto-update success I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 30 minutes administering it.

Currently have it running on DO with daily droplet snapshots and it’s a nice reassurance that wherever happens, I can get back to a working state and never lose any data.

The prices of block storage on DO are pretty steep, I'm seeing $50 a month for 500 GB..? Am I missing something?

My storage requirements are low and I’m currently using the 25gb or so of space that comes with the droplet. Unfortunately I can’t comment much on a Nextcloud setup with block storage.

There are cheap Nextcloud instance available elsewhere, such as Hetzner.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

So, I've been curious about nextcloud for a good while, does Hetzner keep the version of NextCloud up-to-date? Which functionality is included? I'm also looking at Tab.digital from the Nextcloud hosting partners list and they seem to offer a lot of functionality at the private cloud tier that is roughly the same price as the NX20 tier at Hetzner with less storage. I do not need a lot of storage, but having the ability to make extensive use of Nextcloud integrations would be nice, which is not clear from Hetzner's comparison chart.

Yes, they take care of the maintenance and updates. You get an instance with a specific url, and an admin account in which you can activate/deactivate modules ("apps") and manage user accounts.

As far as I can tell you can get the same features as if you managed your own instance.

We use Nextcloud at the office. It works really well.

On the other hand, I pulled the trigger and got myself a developer license for insync. That’s a great client for Google drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

I was hesitant at first, but it works really well, and they have some neat features (ignore patterns, out of tree syncing, directory merge, etc.)

They have added Dropbox support lately.

How solid and reliable is conflict handling on Nextcloud (especially edge cases)?

I did extensive testing on this before adopting Dropbox, but am looking for an alternative now that Dropbox seems to be locking files and plastering ads for their other services instead of working unobtrusively in the background.

While we use a big share with 10+ users, I personally didn't get many conflicts during the Nextcloud installation's lifetime. I got a couple of "You changed this in two computers, and I need to sync both" states, and it duplicated the files with appending the hostname or something else useful. At the end, I either merged them myself or thought "meh, this copy is not needed anymore, anyway" and deleted one of them.

If other users got any conflicts, and got anything borked, I'd have known, since I'm the admin of the installation. However I can't guarantee anything. I think it's working reasonably well for other people, too.

It has some mitigation strategies, and has a pretty extensive list of transient files (like Microsoft Word lock files), so everything works pretty straightforward for us.

It's creating far less problems than I expected, though.

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop

Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.

Promotions.

I see you're being downvoted, but I do wonder to what degree that might be true. Working on a team that maintains something old isn't terribly glorious. Rename the product, and now you have a "product launch" on your resume.

My comment wasn't downvoted, it's actually my most upvoted comment on HN.

I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives.

There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them.

Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user.

Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase.

In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder.

Used to work at Google.

Plenty of people think about it, but the incentives are not set up to center these thoughts in the conversation about what to do. As with most publicly visible problems at any company, this is at its heart a failure of leadership. (Or a success of leadership, if it is indeed what the market and cost structure of the business rewards. I do not have sufficient insight into the financial side to know which. Just because a business makes a decision that is unpopular with its customers does not automatically mean that the decision is bad for the business.)

I agree, it is hard to say whether a decision that fucks over customers is actually bad for Google.

For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB. Even though I am not happy about it, I am paying and it looks unlikely that I will leave the Google ecosystem anytime soon.

The interesting thing about Google, though, is that they have so many products that they can actually run experiments over different approaches to product development.

Unfortunately, I doubt many people at Google would want to experiment with a product development approach by putting their career progression at risk.

> For example, the decision to start charging users for storage beyond 15GB.

If a company decides to stop giving customers free goods, it is not "fucking over customers." Doing something nice for a person for a time does not create any kind of moral or social obligation to keep doing that thing.

That said, I would love to see experimentation in maintenance and consistency. It turns out that type of thing is happening in Cloud at least with enterprise APIs. https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis

Haha, I agree with you in general, but I still see that particular decision as fucking over customers.

I was still at Google when the design doc for that particular decision leaked and was not convinced by the reasoning. These are the kind of decisions that don't affect the wealthy fuck over the poor.

Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

> Unfortunately, it is really difficult to measure the opportunity cost of lost data and lost users.

Additional data could be considered more of a liability than an asset, as it's more data to protect and store and more data that could potentially be exposed in a breach. Likewise, it may be good to lose users who aren't paying but are storing tons of data with us -- which as we've already established can be thought of as a liability. It's good to have a free tier to show the customer the value we can deliver, but if the customer doesn't get enough value from us to pay the (IMO very reasonable) prices for what we're offering, then maybe they would be better served with a different provider -- at least for bulk photo and video storage. This is not a bad thing, IMO.

It is in cases like this where it is hard to objectively evaluate two conflicting options relative to each other that mission should break the tie:

"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Anyway, I think if this decision is really a bad one for the business, someone (e.g. Dropbox) should swoop in and capitalize on it. If that doesn't happen, I would say that you were proved correct.

Dropbox's pricing is in line with Google One storage pricing, without any corresponding discount in the Google store. It's hard to picture a scenario where they are in a position to offer free unlimited photo backup. But it will be great for a subset of consumers if they do! I would be happy to see it. Amazon also offers free photo storage for prime users, although their video storage quotas are even more limited than Google's -- and, at least for me, as a light video user, those comprise the majority of my storage needs.

IMO it is at minimum grey area when company introduces “free unlimited/little limits” while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable and then start charging people after they have moved all their archives to gDrive.

it is legal, but not good either.

> while having clear understanding that it is not sustainable

That hasn't been demonstrated. It could be that when the decision was made to offer free/unlimited storage, there were beliefs about the economics of that option -- particularly, the rate of change in durable storage pricing and performance -- that ended up not being borne out. (I am not privy to any special knowledge about this, but it is at least plausible based on how the storage business had been working for the years leading up to 2015.)

I agree in general that teaser rates -- as opposed to well documented free tiers -- are at best a gray area.

I also worked at Google. Now I'm using Google's Flutter to build a mobile app. I worry that Flutter will stagnate and become unusable on mobile before I can afford native rewrites. Flutter's mobile support is already stagnating. Flutter Team has left many mobile features half-implemented: iOS widgets [0], dark mode [1], location [2], and camera [3]. They even hired an outside company to work on Flutter mobile extensions [4]. Flutter's engineers have moved on to web and desktop. Others have written [5] about this.

Beware depending on any Google tool for your business.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/d51o4w/were_the...

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/80860

[2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31453

[3] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/70751

[4] https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-package-ecosystem-update-...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/ju2zza/flutters...

In Everything, try going to options -> folders, and add the google my drive folder. Seems to be working for me

I'm in the Drive for Desktop beta program and it combines the Backup & Sync functionality with Drive File stream, so you can sync 'My Drive' to any folder on your computer in addition to having a drive letter for file streaming. It also supports multi-account support. I've had some performance issues with it so it still needs work.

I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.

> I guess this doesn't help on Windows

Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.

NTFS/ReFS support symlinks if that's what you meant.

> NTFS/ReFS support symlinks

That's a better description actually. Windows 10 is too vague.

I'd be happy if I could just stop it placing "desktop.ini" files in every fscking folder.

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