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It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

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Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#31

My guess is that engineering resources have been focused on the upcoming new version of drive, and are ignoring difficult bugs with the current version. I could understand that in a smaller company, but seems poor at Google scale. OTOH, that scale also means they don't care about losing a few customers over something like this.

The issue is, Google is trying to make serious inroads into enterprise with Cloud/GSuite. This almost certainly costs Google more in reputation among that crowd than it would to fix it or just offer a refund.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#32

Personal advice: Spend one time 30$ on insync https://www.insynchq.com/ The Google Drive Sync application (which is internally python on Mac and Windows I heard) is horrible and a memory and cpu hog. Insync solved all my problems and with that software I could replace Dropbox. BTW: Filipino guys engineered that. I'm proud that I have one piece of Filipino software running here :D

+1 for Insync, it just works, also allows multiple accounts and works on Linux, something I'm surprised still isn't offered officially by Google.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#33
Thanks for sharing the story.

Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because:

1. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a good chunk of time to solve. 2. Since the bug is so old, its not on anybody's priority list. Picking it up just translates to me sacrificing time from my family and hobbies. 3. Even if I go out of my way to sacrifice my time to fix a bug for a customer, there is rarely any gratitude (especially since the issue is months old). Typically, a follow up response would be (rightfully) along these lines: "It took you guys 6 months to fix my problem. Can I get refunded for the past 6 months?"

Knowing how much stress and pain this bug (probably very unique) has caused the author, I will make it a point to always understand old tickets and prioritize it with management to make sure they get resolved promptly.

Is it okay for an engineer to take responsibility for a client and reach out to them directly instead of through an middle man support? Say I was an engineer working on google drive, could anything go wrong if I tweeted author and told him I would personally look into his issue and work with him on it?

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#34

This is why Dropbox has value. It works, its reliable, and if you're a paying customer you can get support. Spend the $10/month. Don't go on for more than half a year with your storage being broken. Disclaimer: no affiliation except a satisfied pro account user EDIT: Edge cases notwithstanding.

FWIW, I have a Dropbox for business account and have contacted support several times. Their answers are often scripted and annoyingly devoid of actual helpfulness. I had a problem with Dropbox on Linux forgetting my login/settings. They were no help in solving the issue. I still use and recommend Dropbox, but their "support" has not seemed all that helpful for the power user issues I've needed help with.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#35
post #34

This is why Dropbox has value. It works, its reliable, and if you're a paying customer you can get support. Spend the $10/month. Don't go on for more than half a year with your storage being broken. Disclaimer: no affiliation except a satisfied pro account user EDIT: Edge cases notwithstanding.

FWIW, I have a Dropbox for business account and have contacted support several times. Their answers are often scripted and annoyingly devoid of actual helpfulness. I had a problem with Dropbox on Linux forgetting my login/settings. They were no help in solving the issue. I still use and recommend Dropbox, but their "support" has not seemed all that helpful for the power user issues I've needed help with.

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Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#36

Personal advice: Spend one time 30$ on insync https://www.insynchq.com/ The Google Drive Sync application (which is internally python on Mac and Windows I heard) is horrible and a memory and cpu hog. Insync solved all my problems and with that software I could replace Dropbox. BTW: Filipino guys engineered that. I'm proud that I have one piece of Filipino software running here :D

+1 for Insync, it just works, also allows multiple accounts and works on Linux, something I'm surprised still isn't offered officially by Google.

Yes, they should have bought Insync for a good amount of money give Insync for free to everybody. It just works as you said. I also had sync problems with certain file names on the official sync client. Insync just keeps working and I use it for 2 Google Accounts currently (one personal, one gsuite).

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#37

This is why Dropbox has value. It works, its reliable, and if you're a paying customer you can get support. Spend the $10/month. Don't go on for more than half a year with your storage being broken. Disclaimer: no affiliation except a satisfied pro account user EDIT: Edge cases notwithstanding.

Perhaps.. but Dropbox is not without its own issues.

I tried diligently to get Dropbox after hearing statements like yours. I signed up and added my dataset, 600GB of ~670,000 objects. It never would sync, used 10GB+ of memory while "preparing" to sync and ultimately crashing.

I use Google Drive now, and it's not without its issues, but my data is synchronized.

I'm not saying Dropbox is a bad product; I'm trying to show that every product has issues.

My attempt was circa mid-2016.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#39
post #33

Thanks for sharing the story. Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because: 1. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a good chunk of ti…

Depends on company culture. I would expect that a Googler would get into some trouble (at the very least step on some toes, though that might be warranted in this situation) if they basically cut out the team this particular bug was triaged to. Probably better to escalate internally and have the engineers actually responsible for fixing the bug have it made a higher priority.

Re: It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

#40
post #11
post #3

Seems like the root cause here is the drive sync app is 32 bit and thus running into the 2GB memory limit. I wonder if it's built with LARGEADDRESSAWARE? Otherwise you could hex edit that into the PE header and get double the usable address space as a possible workaround.

For anyone else who didn't manage to skim the right parts of that massive communication log, here is a link to the bug in question. https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTomo298Ko1vU... > Google Drive Error D41D "Unspecified Error" when trying to upload/sync large amount of files (700GB/1.2 Million files)

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