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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

This work is 10x more effort than it sounds too due to how severely mistakes are penalised (i.e. unrecoverable files), necessitating extreme caution.

When uploading 10k photos from macOS to Google Cloud using the Google Cloud macOS app, it said syncing had completed about 2 hours earlier than my back-of-the-envelope calculations predicted. "Great", I thought, but was still a bit suspicious, so just in case, before deleting the local copy, I closed the Google Drive app and reopened it, and it immediately started syncing - there were 2k photos/videos to go (!!). That's how insanely easily it could be to lose precious memories due to a tiniest bug in cloud software.

Surgical precision and extreme thoroughness are the only ways to approach these seemingly simple operations of moving files from one computer to another.

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I wish more software companies had a core value of “every user created bit is sacred.”

Storage is cheap enough that this attitude is possible.

But I guess keeping all of your designers aware of it across thousands of teams is too hard.

> every user created bit is sacred

They only care about the bits they can sell to advertisers. Actual user data is only a burden to them, and occasional data loss is not a big deal.

As usual, user are not making them paying the price for being badly treated. Software companies do this because they can get away with it, that's it.

Even on HN many people can't be arse to use Firefox, how could we expect anyone to avoid giants like Microsoft?

Sadly Firefox has been utter garbage for me the last few months, routinely hangs for me on 3 different machines across two different OSes.

Running out of options these days

Sounds like an extension acting up. Haven't noticed any issues on my devices.

Honestly, the Google Drive for Desktop app was extremely reliable when Google was managing the files.

Then when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems, it migrated to that. And it's been a complete mess. Uploads often don't get triggered until you restart the system, exactly what you're describing.

I'm pretty sure they're Apple macOS bugs, not Google ones. Because those kinds of bugs are constant across everything iCloud and Mac, but I don't generally see them on Google-only stuff.

> when macOS provided native support for cloud filesystems

When was that? I haven't regularly used a Mac in a good four years. At the time I had the Google Drive app with a business subscription, and I don't think there was any other option. It was terrible, to the point I completely gave up on it. Just like the other poster says, it would say, "I'm all synced up", but only half my files would be synced. I'd need to restart it to get syncing again. When I would try to get a large amount of files from the cloud to local storage, it would randomly crap out.

Basically, it would stall very often, and this was on wired gigabit ethernet, not some spotty mobile connection from a phone via wifi in a crowded cafe.

May 2022:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/13067413

Apple calls it File Provider.

I've been using the Google Drive for Desktop file streaming version since it launched in 2017 (file streaming, not exactly sync), I think it was originally called Google DriveFS, and never had any problems until they switched to Apple's File Provider.

There's a different Drive app that only did sync, I think that's what you're talking about. It's much older. Then they got merged into the current one.

Yeah, it's the file streaming one I used to use. My use case was storing my photography collection on it. Combined with lightroom, it was terrible.

For random documents, it worked well enough. But, for that use case, I never had any issue with iCloud nor OneDrive.

I never use iCloud for massive quantities, but OneDrive would also crap out when syncing many large files (I used it as a backup for my camera while travelling earlier this year). Attempting to work with Lightroom out of that would also have it randomly stop syncing (I had checked "keep files on this device" or similar so LR always had local copies).

How many people who owned iPods had their music collection deleted by iTunes? Apple software not caring about the user's bits doesn't seem new...

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