Dropbox and Google Drive

Factual Questions
1

I finally got a smartphone, and I’m looking for a way to sync files between it and my regular PC. I must begin by pointing out that while most people seem to use their smartphone for entertainment, such as video and music and photos and social networking, that comprises a very small part of my life, and I am mostly into documents, such as keeping notes about my projects at work, or writing articles for various purposes.

Until now, I was using Documents To Go, which uses a USB cable to transfer docs between my PC and my Palm PDA. With a great deal of effort, I was able to do that with my new smartphone, but it’s just not as convenient as I had hoped it to be, and I surrender to the 21st century; kicking and screaming, I’m going to use some kind of cloud system.

The top contenders seem to be Dropbox and Google Drive (but I’ll take other suggestions too). The main difference between them seems to be that with Dropbox, the files actually reside on the various devices, with Dropbox automatically keeping them in sync with each other, and this sounds to be exactly what I want. In contrast, I think that with Google Drive, the files reside on Google’s servers, with the result that it I have no internet connection, I cannot get to my data, which would be very bad for me.

I want to minimize my reliance on the cloud for several reasons. One is security, but the main one is that many parts of my building have poor or nonexistent wireless access, and I need my files even there, and that’s what kept me on my PDA for the past few years.

So here’s my questions: Am I correct about Dropbox and Google Drive? and does anyone have any other advice?

(PS: The combined size of all these files will be FAR less than even one GB, so I expect that the free version of any of these services will be quite adequate in terms of storage capacity.)

2

Cubby is a new service that just went public. I’ve been using the beta and I think it’s a great combo of local and cloud sync; much more flexible than Dropbox or Google.

3

You might take a look at SugarSync Pretty versatile in what it does.

4

Google Drive does save everything on the cloud, but there’s no reason you can’t save local copies as well.

5

Google Drive works very much like Dropbox and all the other sync services. You get a local synced copy on your devices, and a copy in the cloud.
Personally I still use Dropbox because I have found Google Drive to be a little crashy. Dropbox has been reliable, for years.

6

Unlike the desktop versions, neither Dropbox or Google Drive on android (and probably other mobile platforms) will store a local copy by default, it will download on demand. This makes sense because even the free the storage allowance is greater than is available on many mobile devices, and the overhead of syncing could easily trash your phone plan’s data allowance. However, with Dropbox if you add a file to favourites it will keep a local copy which you will have to explicitly sync. AFAIK ‘starred’ items in Google Drive are not stored locally, which is a shame.

7

There is a nice Android app called FolderSync that works with many of these cloud services (including Dropbox and SugarSync), and is much better than the clients provided by Dropbox or SugarSync. It synchronizes specific local folders with specified folders on the cloud. Each folder pair can be configured for 1-way or 2-way sync.

8

Thanks, everyone. I’m going to start with Google Drive because that’s where my department at work keeps some of its files, so I’m going to need that on my phone anyway. I didn’t realize it has an option for a local copy. I’ll try it, and if I like it then I’ll use it for my home stuff too.

9

Yes, it does. Google Drive creates a special folder on your PC, which functions just like a local folder, and syncs through the cloud. You can open those files and edit them with MS Office programs, etc., but two important things:

  1. It takes a while for the edits you make on your computer to be synced on your phone. Maybe an hour or two, in my experience.
  2. If you want to use Documents to Go on your phone in combination with Google Drive, you won’t be able to save your edits without taking the file out of the cloud with an additional utility. (At least as of today.) This is a flaw between Documents to Go and Google drive. In order to edit something on the phone with Documents to Go, and then save it for syncing back to your other devices through the Google Drive cloud, you need to install a utility that allows you to download the file from Google Drive to your SD card. After you edit, you then up load it back to Google Drive. I use a free app called Cloud2SD. It’s a hassle, and I imagine they’re working on this to eventually fix it.

Keeve, I use my phone for the same purposes you describe in the OP (not entertainment, but working with documents). So, I]if you can find any other way to get around this, please let me know. Because really, if this is way it has to be, then Google Drive doesn’t have much advantage over the other cloud services.

10

Glad to hear it, because we seem to be quite the ignored minority. I wish we could actually get together in person to share tips, because much of the training I need is best done live. Friends and relatives have shown me a lot in terms of moving stuff around on my phone’s screen, how to use the keyboard, etc etc, but I can’t find anyone who edits documents. So I appeal to the Dopers. Here’s where I’m at currently:

I’m okay with an hour or two, but it is now 14 hours, and it seems to still be processing my stuff. Here’s my story:

Yesterday I installed Google Drive on both my PC and my Galaxy. (It’s a beautiful Samsung Galaxy Note II, with Android 4.1.1, if it matters.) I also copied about twenty DOC and TXT files into the Google Drive folder. They total about 800 KB, which ought to be negligible, given that some apps are ten times the size and installed in seconds.

On my Galaxy, I go into “Drive”, and then into “My Drive”. I can see the names of the files, and even the names of some folders that I had created on the PC inside of the Google Drive folder. I learn how to see what’s inside the folders, and it takes some time to learn this new OS, but I expected that. No problems so far.

The problems begin when I try to actually view or edit any document.

I tap on a simple TXT doc, and I am now at a screen where the bottom half is my keyboard, which I expect, but the top is a blank yellow piece of paper. The very top is a gray bar with the correct name of the file. Why is it blank? Where’s my data?

If I tap on Menu (bottom left, below the keyboard) and then on Information, I get what is analogous to Windows’ “Properties”: It shows me the name of the file, the type, location, size, and last date modified, all of it accurate. The size of this particular file, by the way, is 14.6KB. The attributes is “Read only”, which bothers me, but we’ll get back to that later. The truly annoying part is that even though the file is not empty (it does have 14.6KB of data!), the top of the screen shows a plain blank yellow sheet of paper. Where the hell is my data? I sent this from my pc14 hours ago!

I try another idea. I back up to the file list, and instead of tapping directly on the file name, this time I tap the right-arrow on the right side of the screen. I don’t know what to call this screen. The top half has a large button with a big blue “file” icon, and the caption “Open”. Tapping it brings me to the empty yellow-and-keyboard screen that I saw before. I back out, and now the blue icon has been replaced by what looks like a tiny screen shot of my file. This is good, I say to myself. The text is extremely tiny, but it is just barely good enough that I can recognize it and confirm that it is the same text that exists in this file on my pc. Apparently, it has finally been downloaded from the cloud to the phone. – But when I tap “Open”, my yellow sheet of paper is still blank!! WTF???

I back out, and note that there’s a toggle switch labeled “Available offline”, and it is in the “off” position. I slide it to “on”, and tap “open” but the document is still blank. I give it another 5 minutes, and still nothing. I add my other account to the “who has access” section, and two hours later, I can still see the text inside the “open” button, but everything is still blank when I actually tap “open”.

I could have copied the document with pen and paper five times by now. Why can’t I even read the thing?

Okay, this file and another are not opening. It dawns on me that they’re both TXT files, and that my DOCs are sort-of readable. Am I going to have to avoid text files?

Not that I’m happy with what’s happening to my DOCs – they’re all read-only. When I open it, I get a message: “To open the document as read-only [OK]”. This makes it sound like I have a choice, but I really don’t. Regardless of whether I tap “ok”, or whether I avoid that by tapping “back” (Is that the name of the “undo” button on the very bottom right corner of the phone?), either way I can now read and even edit the document. But when I try to save it, I’m in what is analogous to the Windows “Save As”, meaning that I am forced to give it a new name, but even worse, I’m in a folder that is somewhere outside of the Google Drive folder. Meaning that even if I save these changes, I will not be able to edit it further with Google Drive. (As it turns out, I CAN see this newly-created document with the Polaris Office app that came with the phone, but that’s a whole 'nother bag of worms.)

This is GQ, so here are my questions:
What steps did I miss?
And where is the tutorial that would have saved me trouble of typing all this?

11

Good points. However, I will say that on the Dropbox client on my Android phone, I don’t have to explicitly sync my favourites. They sync as soon as I go to the Favourites section, and any edits I make on the phone are automatically synced back to my PCs.

12

Google does have “help” pages, but they’re not that good for trouble shooting specific, idiosyncratic problems; they just tell you what to do when everything is working right. Instead, there are forums where you can post a question about a problem, and with luck eventually someone who’s solved the same problem will come along and help you.

I have no idea what the weird empty “ghost” file with the yellow page and gray bar is all about. Something like this shouldn’t happen with a generic .TXT file. I suspect it has something to do with the particular document editing utility on your phone. It might be an aspect of your (newer) version of Android, of some other utility that is automatically opening the files you’ve put in Google Drive. I further suspect the problem is that the files you’re trying to open are not Google Docs files proper, and so Google Drive is not recognizing them, but I could be wrong in this. Try creating a Google Docs file (using your PC, while logged into Google Drive), and see if your phone reacts to the file in the same way.

I’m using Android 2.3.6, on a pretty basic smart phone, so that I think that makes some of the details with your situation very different (and more complicated) from mine. I don’t know anything about Polaris (it could help, or just be a dead end for what you want to do). HOWEVER, I think I see what you generally can do, based on what I’m doing, especially with regard to MS Office files, in order to work with them on your phone in a (more or less) synchronized way.

First, you shouldn’t even try to edit any MS Office files with through Google Drive on your phone. That won’t work. Remember that Google Drive was only started earlier [DEL]this[/del] last year, as an outgrowth of Google Docs, and the two are not quite the same thing—they have somewhat differing purposes, though now all Google Docs functions are merged into Google Drive. Because Google Docs files are NOT MS Office files, Google Drive can only do so much with them. You can have both file types in Google Drive, and their icons LOOK very similar in the Google Drive directory (which is something Google should change, I think). Google Docs files emulate MS Office files, and one can convert them from or into MS Office files, but the real purpose of Google Docs is so that multiple users (in different places) can edit the same file (which used to reside in the cloud only, but now, with Google Drive is on all devices, too) simultaneously. Because the (new) Google Drive includes this capability (of the former Google Docs service), it makes Google Drive much more useful than Drop Box, (and that’s why we use it in the workplace I’ve recently transferred to, instead of Drop Box).

But it also confuses things, because syncing files is a fundamentally different purpose. So now you can have an MS Office .doc file, for example, in your Google Drive folder, right next to a Google Docs word processing file, but you can’t use them in the same way. You can’t edit the MS Office file with Google services, but that’s not a problem for your PC computer. You still just click on it in the Google Drive folder, and your MS Word program will open it and allow you to edit and save it as any other file on your hard drive. Google Drive, will sync those changes you made with your PC to the file in the cloud—eventually. As we discussed above, it’s not instantaneous, for some reason, but for me it usually syncs in about an hour or so.

However, with your phone it isn’t so simple when you want to open and edit the MS Office files you’ve put on Google Drive. Right now, Google Drive doesn’t allow you to just seamlessly open the files, and edit and save them with your phone the same way you can on your PC computer. There is a function in Google Drive called “Make Available Offline,” but this really only works for Google Docs files—NOT MS Office files. (You can put MS Office files “offline,” but when it comes to saving them, the system rejects them.) Essentially, with your phone, in order to edit and save synchronized MS Office files, you have to download the file from Google Drive to your phone’s SD card, then open, edit and save it on the SD card with an app on your phone (namely, Documents to Go, which, as you know, is like MS Office for mobile use, but maybe Polaris can do it, too). Then you have to upload it back to Google Drive. (Just remember—unlike with the DOS-based Windows platform—Google Drive will allow you to save two files with the exact same name in the same folder, so to avoid confusion, you have to be vigilant about changing file names with your file saving practices). Google Drive already will upload files of any type from your phone’s SD card. However, for some reason it won’t download files to your phone’s SD card (even though it will do that to your PC hard drive). So at this time, you have to use a third party utility app to get the file from Google Drive to your SD card, and as I described in the post above, I use Cloud2SD for that. (This app essentially uses the “SEND” command from within Android to save the file to your SD card.)

I can’t really address the specific complications and problems you’ve described in the post above, because they seem to be related to functions in Android 4.1.1 or apps in addition to Google Drive that I don’t have. But I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to follow the basic procedure I’ve just outlined. You still will need to install the Cloud2SD app on your phone, in order to get your MS Office files from Google Drive to your SD card so you can work with them. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Well, if I have to do all this to work with MS Office files, then it really isn’t true syncing.” Yes, that’s true on the phone end of the situation, but with your PC the MS Office files are truly synced in the Google Drive cloud, though it strangely takes such a long time for the changes to appear in the cloud with non-Google Docs files. And keep in mind, if you want to have instantaneous and seamlessly synced files at all points (PC, phone, tablet, etc.), you can always start the files off as Google Docs files, and then convert them to MS Office files when you need to finish them off, or print, or whatever. (You just won’t have the exact formatting, and all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Word and Excel while you’re working on them.) And, of course, before you convert them, you can have anyone in the world who’s online also work on the synced documents, even at the same time that you are working on them. This is something that Drop Box can’t do, and that I often take advantage of at my job. It’s really convenient if, for example, I’m out of the office, and a colleague wants to go over the wording in a document. I can be anywhere, and just with my phone, we can both talk about, look at, and make changes in the document at the same time. We can do things that we previously had to meet for–even if I’m stuck somewhere across L.A. or waiting for the Metro train.

13

Pretty much what I wanted to day, but you phrased it much more diplomatically. Kudos!

Googling my question led me to a gazillion of them. Anyone have a favorite?

Excellent idea. I made such a file a few minutes ago, but it hasn’t shown up on the phone yet. Here’s a real question: The phone has a “sync” button at the top, which I hoped might speed up the process of pulling it down from the cloud. But I don’t see anything similar on my (Windows XP SP3) pc. The Start button has only one thing for Google Drive, and it brings me to the Google Drive folder. I don’t see any software that I can use to do a manual sync, or even to change any settings. There must be such somewhere, but where?

Yeah. This article in PC World convinced me of the same thing, and I’ve already started to try out Dropbox.

Thanks again for the ideas!

14

Dropbox seems to do exactly what I need, and almost immediately.

Moved two files (one TXT and one DOC) into the Dropbox folder on the pc, and they showed up on my phone in less than a half-minute. Edited both on the phone, and the changes showed up on the pc too fast to measure.

I’m done for now, unless anyone can suggest particularly good forums. Thanks all!

15

DropSync also works, though as far as I know it only works with Dropbox. I find this useful to force backups of some phone files that aren’t stored in the Dropbox folder on the phone.

I haven’t delved too deep into Google drive, but I know it partly evolved from Google Docs where the files were solely stored in the cloud. You could download them, but there was no “automagic” sync. Google Drive may have changed that.

As far as documents not being downloaded to the phone by default with Dropbox: true, but it’s really transparent: you navigate to the folder in the phone’s Dropbox app, and you see the file name; it’s downloaded when you select and open it.

16

Yes, that’s probably best for you. I use Dropbox for the things I work with most frequently, but the 2.5 gig limit on the free account would never be enough for all the materials I have to deal with for work.

17

You can get quite a bit more than that free. If you have a smartphone, turn on Camera Uploads. That’ll earn you another 3 gig free as photos upload (and you keep the space even if you move the photos elsewhere). There may be a way to do that with photos loaded onto a desktop computer.

You can get another half gig (ish) by doing some introductory stuff. You can get more by referrals, though those are hard to come by. One of those might be how you got the half gig on top of the 2g everyone gets.

Lifehacker has a tip (and you can find it elsewhere as well) that suggests using Google AdWords to advertise your link. That can get you up to 16 gig (32 referrals). It’s slower to do that than it used to be, but can be cost effective, as there’s no intermediate level for folks who don’t need a full 100 gig (lowest paid tier).

18

I believe that I’ve gotten camera upload “credit” by inserting the SD card from a regular digital camera into a reader on my laptop and letting the dropbox app extract the photos.