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Comment by QuercusMax | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I don't work anywhere near this stuff, and this is just my own personal opinion.

In my mind, Drive isn't a file sharing / storage system, but rather a document sharing / storage system. If you want to store large numbers of files, you should use Cloud Storage, which can handle that. Drive is the cloud equivalent of LAN shared folders - you know those janky NFS and SMB shares that were always a giant headache because of permissions and other nonsense? That's what Drive is trying to be.

Seems like they could do it without the jankiness, though.

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https://www.google.com/drive/ 's title does call it a "File Sharing Platform".

> always a giant headache because of permissions and other nonsense? That's what Drive is trying to be.

It definitely lives up to that. I'm always getting sent links to files I can't open.

I don't think the average user would understand the nuance, though. (I don't think I do)

But the average user is not writing automated systems to populate google drive with millions of files. Once you are doing something that unusual you should understand that nuance. Sure it is fun to hack a tool designed for one purpose to serve another, but if you are writing code for use in production you have to understand these types of design differences.

~50% of the users are above average. I doubt that Google was aiming to make only ~50% of the user base happy.

Drive is very closely linked with Docs, Sheets, Slides. These aren't "files" in the traditional sense. These, plus things like PDFs, videos, etc are what Drive is designed to help manage.

If you have 100,000 source code files, art assets or something like that, you probably don't want to use Drive to manage them. The UI just isn't built for it and it doesn't scale.

The browser interface doesn't scale. But the mount as filesystem absolutely scales enough to accumulate 5 million files.

I'm pretty sure Google Drive Desktop software by Google doesn't restrict the syncing to these basic for formats.

I certainly joined GDrive believing it is designed as a cloud drive where I put whatever I'd like.

I’ve never had a problem with NFS, and modern filers would laugh at 3 million files.

I really dislike Google Drive. I can’t imagine people would use it at all if not for the fact that it’s bundled, monopoly style, with the office suite and gmail.

Since Google won’t ever fix it, I’m hoping they rapidly make it so crappy some other competitor crops up.

Of course, with our luck, it’ll be some Microsoft offering.

I wish software would stop getting worse.

That does seem how it operates. A lot of the UI is directed at document sharing.

That's what makes me double take when I hear about folks using it for some very creative, but not what I think of uses for Google Drive.

Is there a limit on the number of files in cloud storage?

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