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Comment by rzzzt | Hacker News Reader

From the macOS 13 thread by OP:

  > If you don't know what it is, and don't use it - it probably won't affect you.
  >
  > But some people use this tool to control and work with apps that use the 
  > FileProvider API: such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, ShellFish, etc.

I feel like I'm covered by the first sentence, but still curious as to what can be controlled by the CLI tool portions.

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One important thing for me was being able to fix broken cloud storage paths that had become out of sync for whatever reason. This was a frequent-enough issue for my users of Google Drive, and to a lesser extent, OneDrive that I had built some tooling around it into our MDM. This worked by calling the subcommands `fileproviderctl materialize`, `fileproviderctl domain remove` and `fileproviderctl evict` to clear these broken paths and restore the sync to a working state. No longer possible.

It’s kind of sad that even after 15+ years, no one has caught up to Dropbox. None of the other cloud providers do proper block-level sync, and I hear much less about Dropbox breakage than other providers.

It does make sense because OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive are tie-in services. If you use Microsoft 365 / Apple / Android you are “forced” to use them to gain access to certain features, meaning there is no competitive pressure.

I'm not sure on what basis you came to your conclusion but I do not have my issues with OneDrive on Mac and gdrive on Windows for ages.

They mentioned a specific feature (delta sync) that not all providers support. Onedrive seems to after 2020, but I don't think Gdrive does.

It doesn't matter if you're just syncing a bunch of small files (code, documents, images) but can make a big difference in bigger files (compressed archives, large media assets, etc.)

https://www.cloudwards.net/block-level-file-copying/

Google Drive used to, maybe still does keep versioning metadata in file names

Dropbox is still superior IMO. I have a Office365 subscription but OneDrive can make a huge a mess with default settings if you aren't careful when you set it up on anything but a new machine. It's just less slick overall - plus I really want first class Linux support.

I don't want to pay for two file storage systems though and the 3 host limit on Dropbox is a shame. Without it they'd be all but guaranteed to lock me in and I would (gladly) start paying again in a year or so for more space.

Instead I switched to syncthing, which is great but not as nice.

Yeah I have many different cloud storage subscriptions. And although I don’t like Dropbox as a company due to the things they did, it is the only thing that really works, all the time.

A “refuse” to “upgrade” to the fileprovider version, as I don’t want stupid&slow functionality like iCloud Drive.

OneDrive has had block level sync dor all files for 4 years.

Syncthing not only does block-level sync, it does it in a distributed fashion.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/syncing.html

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