Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

I won't go near Google Drive until they fix some serious longstanding issues with the desktop client. The two that caused me to abandon Google Drive (I even have a free TB for 3 years from my Chromebook Pixel):

1. No way to re-sync existing folders on your computer (seriously). I was pushing hundreds of GBs of photos to my Google Drive, and after syncing everything, upgraded to a new computer (the files were stored on an external drive locally). You'd think you should be able to reconnect to your account and point it at the files that already exist locally. Nope. There's no way to do it - the client tries to be so "smart" that it will refuse to recognize existing files, and tries to re-sync both copies (both ways) as duplicates.

2. The desktop client consumes nearly 100% CPU while syncing. I realize that while scanning local folders, the client may need to run checksums on files (potentially CPU intensive), but Google Drive was consistently eating up extraordinary CPU resources even after scanning the local files. I would expect some occasional disk IO and high network IO, but not constantly high CPU usage... who knows what they're doing.

What bothers me most is that Google appears to be completely ignoring these issues, even with hundreds of posts on their forums over years with people complaining about these things.

Same position here. Ignoring the whole Google/privacy stuff, Drive seems fundamentally broken.

In my case it's things like if you need to replace a file it's luck as to if it syncs or not. First you copy it in place, but it renames the copy you just put there (no option to just replace it) so you learn to delete the thing first, but no, you'll replace it and the sync engine didn't seem smart enough to realise the file had actually changed, and you would end up with either the old file left on the server or worse it would pick up the delete operation and forget the replacement.

This was a few months ago, but that's still long after the service had been out in the wild. The concept of these cloud storage things, especially once proper APIs are available and we can switch storage providers independently of app providers, is a good one, but GDrive doesn't seem to get the fundamentals right.

Google Drive desktop client does have issues (Mac). However, the worst pile of junk is the Box.com client; even with their paid business plans the uploads are unimaginably slow. I searched and found long support threads on forums complaining about this problem. Quickly abandoned Box and remain perplexed at all the hype behind that company.

Dropbox is the best overall; has the best web interface and desktop client. Google Drive is second, but because more of my clients are familiar with, and already have, Google accounts, and I pay for Google Apps already, I use Google Drive.

I didn't used GDrive enough to see your problems but for me, the missing "right clic" -> "copy public link" to get a DIRECT link on a public file is what's stopping me from even considering it as an alternative to Dropbox.

The big client issue for me is the bandwidth usage.

Google Drive has no intelligent throttling, so it consumes your entire upload pipe, which makes other apps unusable. This is not really what I want a background service to do.

I agree. Due to the lack of throttling, I had to write a script that paused Google Drive any time I was using the computer - just to have network and CPU resources to do simple things like browse the web (and this was on a fairly recent, fast machine). I tried to make it work... I really did.

I actually get annoyed when Dropbox doesn't consume my entire upload pipe.

90% of what I use Dropbox for is stuffing files in my Public folder and getting a URL from them, and that's a synchronous action--I can't do anything until I have the URL. So it should use all the bandwidth it can.

I think the point is that it should be user-configurable. Most of the competitors' desktop clients (including Dropbox) have a setting for that, so you can choose what suits your needs.

I, too, would appreciate a lot more focus on the desktop client.

For me, it would be a matter of selective folder synching. Right now, you have to sync the entire drive. My Air only has 128GB SSD. I just want to sync a couple work folders, not my entire 70GB of stored files.

Unfortunately, Google's direction is pretty clear and I expect they'll discontinue support for the Desktop client before they ever enhance it.

Do these instructions for selective sync not work? https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375083

Hah, nice! This didn't exist the last time I looked for the feature. Guess I was wrong; they are improving it.

It is exactly because of these reasons that they are dropping the cost. They clearly know that they don't have a market share. I stopped using GD exactly due to the reasons you mentioned above, and I am not going back at any cost!

Good points.

3. No block level sync. This is a big deal for me since I use big encrypted files (block cipher). They work flawlessly with Dropbox. Incremental changes = incremental update.

3. Google Drive client frequently crashes after sleep / wakeup in my Windows machine, I run Dropbox as well, never crashed, not even once.

Point 2 is a common theme with Google Drive, Dropbox and others. Tested only on hexacore dev machines with SSD backed RAM disks, their moron developers thought it prudent to just absolutely trash the system with harddisk IO on boot, presumably to find out that nothing has changed, as a simple timestamp check could have told them.

True - most do some heavy IO when first launched. I've tested syncing modest amounts of data with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.net, as well as backups with Dolly Drive, CrashPlan and Arq. In my experience, none of the other clients come close in terms of sustained CPU usage during the entire process like Google Drive does.

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