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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

#151

Post by phillipsdesign »

js3dev wrote: post #24

I synched about 50GB to google drive and discovered that it started silently eliminating some of my files. The eliminated files weren't found on google dive's bin, but were in my local mac's trash without any matadata or folder info so I couldn't put them back into their original folders. Good thing I had a backup of all these files. Their synch algorithm seems messed up, it also fails to synch every 2 hours on mac.…

The same thing happened to me. Google Drive began silently deleting any duplicate files it found in any of my directories, leaving just one original. A lot of my projects use the same web framework, hence my projects were all broken. Restoring them via their UI wasn't possible either. I stopped using Drive after that.

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

#152

Post by rasengan0 »

CS can be like talking to a wall, the consumer works for the vendor. Squeaking wheel escalates to higher tiers. But sometimes outliers like local sync clients really cannot/will not be fixed -- not enough community out cry ot telemetry. Sounds like my experience with the old sync client for OneDrive for Business on 32bit Windows 7 box - won't sync, stalls at 82K files. Surprised support did not pass the buck to Microsoft. 6 months on, the solution is to upgrade to Win 10 and start over. Perhaps a solution is try on another platform say a friend's chromebook and rebuild the file structure with manual tedium.

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

#153

Post by victorhooi »

laurentoget wrote: post #129

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…

I don't profess to being an expert on this issue - but it's a bit more complex than simply "We don't work at X files". There's a bunch of factors, including the user's own environment, and lengths of certain fields that can affect what the exact limit is. Memory is a moving target.

Other clients exhibit similar behaviour - e.g. Dropbox states a limit of 300,000 (https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit), and from my own informal testing, I know Box.net also exhibits odd behaviour as well.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but the above comments are purely my own).

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

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #138
prirun wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Get notification of file change, binary search the list of files, make adjustments. This can also be done on a small amount of memory, independent of file count.

I'm sure it's tricky to update the existing software, but as a generic problem syncing files with O(1) or O(logn) memory is not very hard.

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

#156

Post by victorhooi »

gcb0 wrote: post #133
laurentoget wrote: post #129

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 understa…

We do care, and it's certainly something we have been actively working on.

However, the fact that other desktop sync clients from other providers exhibit similar performance characteristics possibly indicate that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume.

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

#157

Post by victorhooi »

prirun wrote: post #123
victorhooi wrote: post #59

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.

The problem is unfortunately not as simple as a naive first pass might assume.

There's a lot of nuance involved here - and the fact you have to do bi-directional sync, with a reasonable expectation of "real-time" makes it tough as well.

Also - the fact that other desktop clients (e.g. Dropbox, Box.net) exhibit similar performance characteristics (e.g. Dropbox advertises a 300,000 file limit - I believe this customer was going on 700,000 files) would also probably indicate it's not quite that simple.

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

#158

Post by microtonal »

victorhooi wrote: post #156
gcb0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understa…

We do care, and it's certainly something we have been actively working on. However, the fact that other desktop sync clients from other providers exhibit similar performance characteristics possibly indicate that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume.

We do care, and it's certainly something we have been actively working on.

Did you read the time line? Even if his issue is directly being worked on, which is doubtful if you look at how many layers of clueless tech support this apparently goes, this is terrible customer support. If you promise to reply in 48 hours, reply in 48 hours. Give the customer compensation for the months the product did not work properly and maybe a gift voucher for all the effort they put into helping to solve this bug.

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

#159

Post by natch »

victorhooi wrote: post #116
paulmd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Google Drive is sold as a customer-facing service and customers have a basic expectation that it will do what it says on the box. If the Dropbox application didn't run, I'd be pissed too, even if it does happen to be "online storage". If someone was complaining that an Amazon S3 application was broken, that would be a different story.

If you read above - Dropbox does exactly that... > https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit They claim a limit of around 300,000 files - this user apparently has 700,000 files. The Google sync client doesn't have a hard limit per se, but yes, the performance does similarly decline after a certain point - it depends on a number of factors, but it's possibly at 700,000 that you would see issues. It should…

That seems like a ridiculously small number of files at which to start encountering problems. I would expect Google to make things more scalable. Yes I realize you have to work with what the OS gives you, but still, you can build your own stuff on top of that, no?

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

#160

Post by inferiorhuman »

victorhooi wrote: post #156
gcb0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understa…

We do care, and it's certainly something we have been actively working on. However, the fact that other desktop sync clients from other providers exhibit similar performance characteristics possibly indicate that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume.

> that it's not as easy to solve as a naive first pass would assume.

Because Google doesn't have the resources to tackle challenging problems? lol.

A difficult to solve problem on its own is one thing, but the comically awful support Google offers indicates that it's more likely a "we don't care" versus a "we don't know how" problem.

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