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Disable Google Drive drive letter

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Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#61

Post by zomglings »

deepsun wrote: post #46
sumedh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop Why does Google have this bad habit of changing product names, they do it with Chat as well.

Promotions.

I think my parent comment gets pretty close to the heart of the issue. I don't think it deserves its downvotes. It is a problem of employee incentives.

There are multiple internal approaches to building things. Several of these approaches get funding and head count based on the amount of influence of the people who back them.

Decisions about which product to present to the public are made on technical merit with little consideration to consistency in user experience. The resulting chaos leaks to the end user.

Once a product has launched successfully, the best members (not just engineers) of the team that built it diffuses back into the main body of Google to work on other cool projects (they now have the required political momentum). Product enters stagnation phase.

In 2 - 4 years a technologically slightly better alternative is picked. No one thinks about how to make this switch seamless for their users. End users suffer even harder.

Used to work at Google.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#62

Post by buu700 »

judge2020 wrote: post #53
pedro2 wrote: post #14

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream. Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen. An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: th…

I'm in the Drive for Desktop beta program and it combines the Backup & Sync functionality with Drive File stream, so you can sync 'My Drive' to any folder on your computer in addition to having a drive letter for file streaming. It also supports multi-account support. I've had some performance issues with it so it still needs work.

I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#63

Post by noisem4ker »

xg15 wrote: post #42

Wild guess... but this sounds like the drive letter isn't really a feature but actually an implementation detail leaking through that they are trying to dress up as a feature. At least that would explain their insistence on users hiding the drive instead of removing it. I believe, previously they just had a daemon running on the client PC that synced a local folder with the cloud storage. (Like Dropbox) Now they seem…

That's exactly what it is, and what the old Google Drive File Stream was.

Reading the comments here and in the linked forums, it seems I'm one of the few used to how Google Drive File Stream worked, and most of the complaints are coming from people more used to the folder-based variant, which has been now shoehorned into the other paradigm.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#64

Post by muststopmyths »

2ion wrote: post #47
richardwhiuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you install the app just for the user who is logged in then you don't need elevated permissions to install or upgrade.

So an unprivileged service can map drive letters on Windows?

If the user is mapping a network location they have access to, obviously yes.

I'm guessing this thing is probably exposed via WebDAV.

edited a bit for clarity.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#65

Post by ncann »

xg15 wrote: post #42

Wild guess... but this sounds like the drive letter isn't really a feature but actually an implementation detail leaking through that they are trying to dress up as a feature. At least that would explain their insistence on users hiding the drive instead of removing it. I believe, previously they just had a daemon running on the client PC that synced a local folder with the cloud storage. (Like Dropbox) Now they seem…

I think so. I'm totally not familiar with the pros and cons of mounted drives but I assume there are some operations that are possible or easier to do when it's a mounted virtual drive vs a plain folder? Something related to file streaming where you need to detect that a file is accessed on the fly and "stream" it if it's not already available on local disk?

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#66

Post by bushbaba »

pedro2 wrote: post #14

Google Backup & Sync is being replaced by Google Drive for Desktop, née Google [Drive] File Stream. Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen. An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: th…

This is why I now refuse to use google products. The constant XYZ is deprecated now use this new thing that doesn’t fully work is tiring.

And Drive is one of their enterprise products.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#67

Post by Pathogen-David »

2ion wrote: post #47
richardwhiuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you install the app just for the user who is logged in then you don't need elevated permissions to install or upgrade.

So an unprivileged service can map drive letters on Windows?

Yes. You don't see it often, but drives can be mounted per user session instead of at the system level.

The easiest way to see this is to use subst to map a drive and then try to navigate to that drive from a UAC-elevated command line. (You won't see the drive since it exists in a different session.)

Mapped network drives and drives shared over remote desktop are other examples of per-user mounts.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#68

Post by ncann »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #25
jpalomaki wrote: post #15

Could this be the first step to migrate away from the folder sync? So eventually you would have just the virtual drive approach. Not an expert here, but I believe the folder sync is technically more difficult to get right and there’s likely lot of edge cases that give you lots of trouble.

That seems plausible to me! I know at Dropbox we always spent a lot of time “playing nice” with the operating system while still providing a very deep and seamless integration. So much complexity and working with gnarly and changing APIs.

I'm curious, would you be able to describe some of that "playing nice" and the complexity of the API? Sounds like a good story time!

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#69

Post by vagrantJin »

buu700 wrote: post #62
judge2020 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the Drive for Desktop beta program and it combines the Backup & Sync functionality with Drive File stream, so you can sync 'My Drive' to any folder on your computer in addition to having a drive letter for file streaming. It also supports multi-account support. I've had some performance issues with it so it still needs work.

I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.

> I guess this doesn't help on Windows

Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.

Re: Disable Google Drive drive letter

#70

Post by chupasaurus »

vagrantJin wrote: post #69
buu700 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this doesn't help on Windows, but with the stable release of Drive on macOS I just symlinked the volume to the location of the original directory.

> I guess this doesn't help on Windows Windows 10 supports symlinking files and directories if that's what you meant.

NTFS/ReFS support symlinks if that's what you meant.
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