Droping Google Drive

Today I stopped using Google Drive as a large cloud storage service. I’ve deleted everything but my Google Docs and started using my DropBox account for day-to-day cloud syncing, for backup I’m using Cloudberry S3 backup desktop to backup to Amazon.com’s Glacier.

At $0.01 per-gigabyte Amazon Glacier is hard to beat, but there are some hidden fees if you plan on restoring all the data at one time. You can use the Unofficial Amazon Glacier Cost-Estimator Calculator to get an idea of what it will cost you.

Google Drive Limitations

After almost a week of using Google Drive I have found a limitation that is a show stopper for me. If you add a file to you Google Drive folder that already exists online it doesn’t check to see if the file is the same as the one online it just re-uploads it, as you can imagine this can be rather irritating if you have 70GB, as I do, of data that is already on two systems that you would like to keep in sync.

Other limitations that are bothering me:

  • It doesn’t tell you what file/folder it is currently syncing.
  • If it errors out it doesn’t give you much info, so if it hung on uploading a file you have to enable debugging and dig through the log file to track it down.
  • Memory usage is way to high, for me average running usage is around 300MB and I’ve see it get up to 1GB.

Google Drive “Unable to sync”

Google Drive (http://drive.google.com) has been long anticipated and finely here. I’ve been using it for the last three days and I put it through some tests and it has passed almost every one. One problem did arise, it got stuck with an error “Unable to sync” with no other information, to resolve the “Unable to sync” error I did the fallowing:

  • Restart Google Drive.
  • Enable diagnostic mode.
    1. Hold Shift and right click on the Google Drive icon.
    2. A new option “Enable diagnostic mode” will be in the list, select it.
    3. A new windows will show up, change the option “Log level” to “Debug”.
    4. Click the “Start logging” button.
  • After Google Drive gives you the Error “Unable to sync” open the debug file (Win7: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Drive\sync_log.log)
  • Look through the log file for an error about some file/s not being able to sync.
  • Once you find the file/s remove them from their Google Drive folder/s on your system.
  • Restart Google Drive.
  • If after a restart Google Drive it is able to sync without any errors then you can manually upload the file/s that you had issues with through the Google Drive web interface (http://drive.google.com).

I have uploaded over 70GB of files and I have only had a problem with one file that happened to be one PSD file out of about 70 PSD files.