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Google Drive: Shortcuts replacing files and folders stored in multiple locations

support.google.com

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Re: Google Drive: Shortcuts replacing files and folders stored in multiple locations

#71

Post by media-trivial »

sangeeth96 wrote: post #23
kevincox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing sounds like two distinct files with the same content. The change only affects the same file that has been "hard linked" into two separate folders. Copies of files are unaffected.

Was this hard-linking only possible when performing an action via the web/app interfaces? Because the wording makes it extremely confusing. Even I thought this was going to affect copies of the same file in multiple places. I don't notice any points in their support doc which tells me otherwise.

There was a keyboard shortcut Shift+Z to add a file to another location (i.e. create a hard-link). Not sure if it still works. The sidebar also has a list of locations that a file is in. Also there are public APIs and documentation for everything.

Re: Google Drive: Shortcuts replacing files and folders stored in multiple locations

#72

Post by media-trivial »

YPPH wrote: post #64

Until today, I didn't know you could create hard links (ie "multi-parent" files/folders) in Google Drive. How did one achieve this? I would like to know, because I'm wondering if I have unintentionally done so. I gather this is completely different from "Make a copy" in the web UI. So how did you do it?

There were many ways, all of them hidden very well, one of them was pressing Shift+Z in the web interface while selecting a file or directory.

Re: Google Drive: Shortcuts replacing files and folders stored in multiple locations

#73

Post by ricktdotorg »

cma wrote: post #53
Hamuko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from Dropbox to Nextcloud, and within a couple of months from Nextcloud to Google Drive. Really didn't like the software and it was so slow since I wasn't self-hosting it, but renting it from Hetzner. Currently thinking of switching from Google Drive to Syncthing, since the new Google Drive clients suck and Google is going to be making my service worse with the new G Suite changes.

The new Google Drive client is horrible with lots of files. It is doing something very wrong in its sqlite database and completely killing performance of the drive where AppData lives, even if the Google drive folder is on a different disk.

can confirm this exact behaviour. its supposed to do intelligent caching/streaming but as mentioned in parent, my DriveFS %APPDATA% filled up with hundreds of GB of temp files. had to uninstall, deltree, reinstall to fix. bit of a pain.

Re: Google Drive: Shortcuts replacing files and folders stored in multiple locations

#74

Post by deepl_derber »

sangeeth96 wrote: post #30
lxgr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a concern of presentation, not the backing implementation: How to present (approximately) hardlinked files to users, with the possible complications of varying support for hard and soft links or other mechanisms across the various client implementations of Google Drive. There's advantages and disadvantages to using either.

I see. I don't use Drive via the web/app interfaces much but essentially, hard links are a thing already and users must've inadvertently created them anyway when doing actions via web/app. Any idea if these hard links can be created with Drive clients on Mac/Win?

They can't. The data model in Drive will no longer support hardlinking, period.
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