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

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

#21

Post by CPAhem »

sowbug wrote: post #17

If someone has a Drive desktop client installed, has two source-code directories with some identical files in them, and modifies one of the identical files in just one of the directories, I can imagine they'd be very surprised when the other copy in the untouched directory also changes. I'm on Linux where there's no official Drive client, so this won't happen to me. (I use Syncthing instead.)

Unless it happens on the backend - which is what the article appears to say.

I'm on Linux with Syncdocs for syncing Google Drive so will wait and see how it handles things.

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

#22

Post by grandpoobah »

Shouldn't de-duping be an implementation detail of the virtual file system, completely hidden from the user?

Isn't that how file sharing/syncing services have worked since the MegaUpload days?

If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

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

#23

Post by sangeeth96 »

kevincox wrote: post #20
sowbug wrote: post #17

If someone has a Drive desktop client installed, has two source-code directories with some identical files in them, and modifies one of the identical files in just one of the directories, I can imagine they'd be very surprised when the other copy in the untouched directory also changes. I'm on Linux where there's no official Drive client, so this won't happen to me. (I use Syncthing instead.)

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.

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

#24

Post by kevincox »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

This whole article sounds like "we're remaking the backend, and no longer support the same file being in multiple locations, so we're just going to break any users using that feature."

My understanding is that this is mostly an attempt to improve the UX around permissions. The inherited sharing and permissions for files in multiple folders were incredibly confusing.

They have disallowed this for Shared Drives from the start as shared drives have ownership and strictly hierarchical permissions. Now they want to bring this UX simplification to everywhere in drive.

I'm sure they are happy to simplify the backend but this definitely makes the product less confusing. It does however make some rare workflows very complicated.

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

#25

Post by lxgr »

grandpoobah wrote: post #22

Shouldn't de-duping be an implementation detail of the virtual file system, completely hidden from the user? Isn't that how file sharing/syncing services have worked since the MegaUpload days? If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

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.

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

#26

Post by akudlacek »

sowbug wrote: post #17

If someone has a Drive desktop client installed, has two source-code directories with some identical files in them, and modifies one of the identical files in just one of the directories, I can imagine they'd be very surprised when the other copy in the untouched directory also changes. I'm on Linux where there's no official Drive client, so this won't happen to me. (I use Syncthing instead.)

Google Drive changing causing issues like this is why I moved to Syncthing. In google drive every so often I would have to de-duplicate a bunch of files appended with (1).

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

#27

Post by sangeeth96 »

grandpoobah wrote: post #22

Shouldn't de-duping be an implementation detail of the virtual file system, completely hidden from the user? Isn't that how file sharing/syncing services have worked since the MegaUpload days? If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

Precisely. I can understand if they want to change the wording on their interfaces going forward to promote folks to use "shortcuts" but it sounds awful if they're going to do this to existing files/directories.

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

#28

Post by pishpash »

layer8 wrote: post #15
snewman wrote: post #3

I worked on the original (long since superseded) implementation of the metadata store for Google Drive, i.e. the system which was responsible for tracking file / folder relationships. The requirement to allow an item to appear in multiple locations was a huge complication, in part because of the way it interacted with permissions being inherited from a folder to the items in that folder. I imagine this change may be…

So is this basically a switch from hardlinks to softlinks?

It's a switch from inference to direct collection of intent from the user.

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

#29

Post by kevincox »

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.

I'm not sure how the sync worked. But for your use case I suspect you won't have this problem.

I'm 99% sure that this is talking about "hard links" not "files with the same contents".

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

#30

Post by sangeeth96 »

lxgr wrote: post #25
grandpoobah wrote: post #22

Shouldn't de-duping be an implementation detail of the virtual file system, completely hidden from the user? Isn't that how file sharing/syncing services have worked since the MegaUpload days? If I upload the same file to two separate folders it's because I want two separate copies. If I change one of the copies, I don't want it to change the other copy.

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?

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