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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

#131

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…

> Why can't Google figure out what the conditions which trigger this issue are and add a caveat to the documentation?

You can't fix software breakage by adding mentions in random documentation pages.

Bad things shouldn't happen if you have more than 500,000 files. And if such things are unavoidable due to limits that are out of Google's control, like from the operating system or the CPU architecture, then the software should warn the user well in advance before any damage occurs.

Google has all the manpower it needs. But this is again one of those instances where they show how little they care. Which should have been obvious by now, given that with all of their manpower and virtually unlimited resources, they still haven't released a Linux client.

This is why I'm staying on Dropbox btw. My data is too important for me to entrust a company that will sell cloud storage as a complementary to something else.

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

#132

Another vote for SyncThing here ( https://syncthing.net ). I've used it on Android, Linux and FreeBSD with great success.

SyncThing needs a lot of UI work. Compare to Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync).

Curious as to what you think it needs? I've found it perfectly adequate for my purposes, and fairly intuitive to set up.

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

#133

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…

if they cared they could fix the bug too.

Google is now a huge, slow corporation.

you don't get promoted by working on old and boring projects. everyone fight to get into the new sexy rewrite of something that is already somewhat successful. yeah they can screw up and kill features, but users will continue to use ensuring your promotions.

in a huge corp, do not assume that just because the little support guy understand your pain, the engineers behind will move a finger.

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

#134
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Despite some occasional competition between 3+ of them, all of the large cloud providers continue to treat 1TB like it's still yuge - and something that only a for-profit enterprise willing to spend hundreds of dollars a year (or more) on storage may encounter.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SyncThing needs a lot of UI work. Compare to Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync).

Curious as to what you think it needs? I've found it perfectly adequate for my purposes, and fairly intuitive to set up.

It's been a few months since I tried it, but I managed to get it into a state where it couldn't find a peer on my LAN via autodiscovery.

The Android client can't back up many folders on Android 5+ where Resilio can - I get write/permission errors despite having granted the app Storage permissions.

The Android client is a thin wrapper around the web UI, but doesn't expose all of the options / status messages.

I should do a side by side comparison.

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

#136
post #98

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.

is this ironic?

what's next? wondering if they have left you tube ui to chance?

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

#137
post #81

Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company that provides products to consumers and then supports them. There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.

Support from Play has been pretty good. I've used it a few times. I have gotten one person whose English wasn't strong, but they did manage to get me a workable contact. The thing they get right, when they get it right, is that their reps have the authority to solve problems.

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

#138
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are forgetting about monitoring for changed files to resync those quickly.

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

#139
post #111
post #81

Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company that provides products to consumers and then supports them. There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.

I've found Google Fi to have exceptionally good support, and the same is true with Nexus phones - a very painless RMA process when something didn't work quite right.

I call that the Google myopia.

the new users of a new, sexy product, usually free, are always in awe because they really go the extra mile and have the best team working on it. that's when everyone else is looking from far away and they see that everything is perfect.

then the team gets promoted, leaves, etc. and what's left is the real Google consumer product. and that is the crap they everyone sees up close. and every problem goes to support forum hell.

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

#140
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

I realise that you probably aren't able to contact the customer yourself, but someone needs to tell the guy clearly what Google thinks the issue is (support saying "according to an entry on the help forum..." isn't exactly conclusive although at least they're trying), refund him for the six months, and suggest any possible workaround. Because there's no direct contact from anyone beyond level 2 support, the guy is st…

>probably aren't able to contact the customer yourself

AKA don't have the courage to do it.

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