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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

Recently I went on a trip with a group. Lots of videos and drone footage. Gigabytes of data. The group leader got a 100GB Google Drive space. But if I upload my stuff into it, my stuff doesn't take his 100 GB, but counts against my quota, unless I modify the files to say that $GROUP_LEADER now owns those files.

Well, whatever. I try to download his videos from the web UI. Select all files in directory, wait about 20 seconds, download zip, wait another 20 seconds, finally the file download dialog shows up. It gives me a 2.3GB zip file. I open it, it's just a few files and not the complete directory. It doesn't give me the contents of the whole directory, just files until it reaches 2.3GB, and then silently fails.

Great jaaab, Google!

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Did you check your browser for google drive site settings?

Google drive has a zip size limit of around 2GB while downloading folders. Usually when you try to download a folder larger than 2GB, it will split these into multiple zip files which all start downloading parallely.

Most browsers block these behind this permission prompt near the address bar "Allow site to download multiple files". If you blink you'll miss it.

If only Google was the one to make the browser that has to service the request, then they could take this extremely niche use case into account.

Gdrive’s download as zip never worked reliably for me, and would like you, fail silently with a happy download completed.

For large binaries better to use Google Drive for Desktop (their official client), which is kinda like rsync mount but bulletproof.

Yeah, except for office files (documents, spreadsheets, slides). They become cloud shortcuts, they don't exist on your disk "physically." Don't rely on that for backups.

Google Takeout converts them to actual, solid files.

I don't see "files shared with me" on the Google Drive for Desktop, do I need to RTFM or watch a YouTube tutorial, because of course it's completely obvious, just like the 100 GB quota issue I described above?

My favorite quirk, which they recently did away with, was in Google docs and sheets. They made a custom right click menu that had it's own Copy and Paste buttons. If you tried to use these "Copy / Paste" options, a full page popup would appear telling you to "Use Ctrl + C / V instead".

So someone at Google was unsatisfied with the system right click options, so they remade them. Then someone else at Google probably thought that was dumb and put the popup to remind people that Ctrl + C / V is better? I don't know, all I want to do is move data. But now I have to confront this issue, which takes me away from my actual problem and makes me process some new information that is completely irrelevant. And besides, I already pressed the button. Why didn't you respect that button press? Why did you give me the option to press that button if you didn't want me to use it?

Thanks Google.

They didn't have Borgmon readability.

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