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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

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

wyclif wrote: post #98
mgkimsal wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"scaling support" almost always seems hand in hand with "dumbing down for lowest common denominator". By the time things have made it through "please restart your computer"-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and "allow" them to actually talk to the people having the problems. This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.

That's exactly what I thought the second I read this: We would be needing further informations It sounds uncannily as if Google has offshored service on Google Drive.

Or just hired people (perhaps on H-1B, perhaps not) for whom American English isn't their mother tongue, and who were hired for their technical rather than language skills.

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

#123

Post by prirun »

victorhooi wrote: post #59
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

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.

I'm not sure what value that would add here... The customer's issue seems to be that they have a very large number of files, and are trying to sync it with a 32-bit desktop client, and are hitting memory issues. Dropbox themselves state this on their websites: https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit > Note: The performance of the Dropbox application may start to decline when you store above 300,000 file…

1. Read list of files present on remote & write to file A

2. Read list of files present locally and write to file B

3. Sort files A & B

4. Read files A & B to update remote and local files

This can be done with less than a meg a memory.

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

#124

Post by scott_karana »

make3 wrote: post #110
redm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Shouldn't you be using something like Amazon S3 at that scale?

Why? A serious hobbyist photographer (for example) could easily generate that many legitimate files. S3 isn't a reasonable alternative for them.

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

#125

Post by jandrese »

flukus wrote: post #118
wildrhythms wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the unfortunate truth is that "please restart your computer"-level stuff actually does solve whatever problem the customer is reporting enough that companies put value into that type of support. If you're reading HN you probably don't need that level of support, but that's not to say there aren't customers who need their hand held to restart a computer.

> If you're reading HN you probably don't need that level of support, but that's not to say there aren't customers who need their hand held to restart a computer. Part of the issue is that support is never allowed to push back on the customer. They don't get to say "I'm sorry, but you'll have to do a rudimentary computing course before I can proceed further". In a business environment it's all to easy to save on trai…

There really isn't a polite way to say "Do you have anyone competent in your office you could maybe ask first?"

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

#126

Post by Steeeve »

mgkimsal wrote: post #45
Steeeve wrote: post #42

That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google. I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is seco…

"scaling support" almost always seems hand in hand with "dumbing down for lowest common denominator". By the time things have made it through "please restart your computer"-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real engineers on problems and "allow" them to actually talk to the people having the problems. This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent on never trying.

Given that this is primarily an entrepreneurial site frequented by at least a few people who will build sizable companies in the future...

Maybe it's time that someone laid out a cost benefit analysis regarding offshoring support and presented a good alternative plan.

It's obvious to a lot of us techies, but there's a different perspective that we should be talking to if we want to see industry change for the better.

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

#127

Post by sundvor »

victorhooi wrote: post #61
Nition wrote: post #17

Ridiculous that they imply throughout that they have a (mysteriously silent) Level 3 support or engineering team working on the issue for almost that entire time. Would be amazing if that's actually true and it turns out they discovered some huge underlying issue with the system from the user logs that they've actually had a team working on... but I'm sure it isn't. For a start if an issue like that was being worked…

I am on that team =). I won't say much publicly, but if this is the issue I think it is (customer has a huge number of files, and is trying to sync it with a 32-bit client, and hitting memory issues), we are aware of the issue, and are definitely working on it. It's a tricky thing to solve in any sync client - for example, Dropbox has a cap around 300,000 files (I believe this customer had 700,000 files?): > https://…

> "... is trying to sync it with a 32-bit client".

Upon reading this I got the impression that the issue was [customer] using 32 bit Windows and therefore not able to use the 64 bit version, however checking out e.g. https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-version-of-Google-Drive-in-..., and also installing google drive myself right then seeing it appear in C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Drive, there's clearly no 64 bit version of Google Drive available at present date (2017-07-10).

Perhaps giving alerts when hitting usage limits would be of help to customers with such a high amount of files. Best of luck resolving it!

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

#129

Post by laurentoget »

Two things i do not get:

- Why can't Google figure out what the conditions which trigger this issue are and add a caveat to the documentation? "Bad things will happen if you use more than 500,000 files on a 32 bit client." This would save both their support organization and their customers a lot of pain.

- Why does this particular user not give up on Google Drive if it does not work for him, or at least try to figure out what is making it choke and avoid that edge case? It is not like it is the only cloud storage solution out there and finding a new one cannot be more painful than this endless BDSM dance with support.

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

#130

Post by Dylan16807 »

make3 wrote: post #110
redm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Shouldn't you be using something like Amazon S3 at that scale?

S3 is expensive per byte, and your use of "that scale" confuses me for an amount that's only about 15% of a new hard drive.
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