I hope this is a simple issue of stupidity, but I’m having trouble getting my Google Drive account off the ground. We’re leaving for a couple weeks on the road later today, so it would be great if someone could help me shorten the self-diagnosis time; we have 600 GB to upload (we have a TB of empty space), and it would be great if it did it while we were away.
I’m using Google Chrome v. 37.0.2062.102m on a Win 7 desktop. I rarely use the browser (I typically use Firefox), so it has minimal extensions/add-ons.
I drag and drop a folder into the My Drive screen, a small frame pops up and says “Uploading … (0%).” It has the folder name/icon, and a 0B/2.28 MB progress bar. Once, I tried from another machine (also Win7), and one file of a folder transferred and then the progress stopped. That’s it—it never progresses past 0 percent on the desktop or a few percent on the laptop, and I’ve left it active/open for hours. This happens whether I’m trying to upload from a local drive or a network drive.
I’m not sure what steps I need to diagnose or narrow down the issue. I’ve tried connected/unconnected from my VPN (subscribed Private Internet Access) and turning off Malware Bytes. What next?
I loaded it but hesitated during install. It wants to create a local Google drive. Any idea if that’s the same thing as having a Dropbox folder? That is, will it try and create a local copy of what’s on the Google Cloud Drive on my machine? I don’t have the 500 to 600 GB of local storage capacity.
If it helps, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. We have a NAS in the house that my wife I an use to work on projects together. Currently, travelling requires copying what we think we’ll need to a USB or local drive on our laptops. If we need something from the server, we use GoToMyPC to log into my computer, then make the transfer. Not only is that cumbersome, it requires my PC didn’t Blue Screen or otherwise shut down. I’d like to eventually sync the NAS to Google Drive so not only do we always have access, we have a remote backup of our files in case of emergency.
My model for this is the success we’ve had with Dropbox, but until they come close to Google’s $120 per year for a TB of space, it’s only for pictures.
…and just to double-check I went over to Dropbox’s page and see that they too offer 1 TB for $120 year.
…so maybe I should shift gears and figure out how to use Dropbox’s selective synch and avoid killing my local drive.
It pretty much works the same way as Dropbox, yes, with selective sync. The big difference is that it can also (if you want it to) sync up Google Docs (as in their online documents) to your desktop PCs, which can clutter up your folder quite a bit. But you can turn that off.
If you don’t want it to download all the existing Google Drive folders, you can deselect them, just like you can in Dropbox.
And yeah, Dropbox just massively increased their storage capacity in the last few days. It works a lot better than Google Drive, especially in instances like yours, because it supports delta sync – meaning if you change one word or a few pixels in a 500 MB file, it’ll just upload that little changed portion, whereas Google Drive will have to re-upload the entire 500 MB. Plus, while you and your wife both connected to the same LAN, Dropbox will sync over that instead. Google will always upload to and redownload from the Internet.
Since we’re on the topic, just wanted to point two other options. What kind of projects are you working on?
If they’re MS Office docs and you both have the latest version, Microsoft OneDrive works well with Office docs. It does the whole syncing thing (including delta sync for office docs) and also lets you edit or view the documents in a browser directly. It also integrates into Windows 8 very well, should you be unlucky enough to be using that OS. The pricing is very affordable: For OneDrive alone, $30 gets you 1 TB for a year. If you want Office, $100 a year gets you 1 TB of Space AND all the major Office programs included, installable on up to 5 computers and 5 tablets.
If you’re making Adobe projects and already have a Creative Cloud subscription, it comes with 20 GB of cloud sync space, but it doesn’t work very well (no delta sync).
Thanks. These are mostly UN publications, so I’m sure Ms. Rice et al would find them excruciatingly boring and would be wholly uninterested.
We do writing, editing and design here, so the files range from Word docs through to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Since the work is fairly static and we don’t need bells and whistles, we’re very comfortable with Office 2007 and CS4. We’ll upgrade when forced, if for no other reason than animosity towards the Ribbon (and fear of what new “features” they’ll impose) and the vast sea of customization we’ve done over the years.
I really don’t know what’s going on and don’t have enough to form a proper question. I upgraded Dropbox too (for ten bucks we can compare services). But when I drag/drop to the Google Chrome browser, once in a while a folder will upload but most of the time it’ll put the “drag and drop here” overlay and when I release the mouse and ‘drop’ folders, nothing seems to happen. Again, I don’t use Chrome at all so other than having Flashblock allow on dropbox, I don’t know what other settings to check. Any thoughts as to the obvious “uncheck this” or “disable that”?
TLDR: Get the desktop version and create a new folder. Uncheck everything else from selective sync. It’ll only upload your files that way and not download any of the existing ones.
Long version: I don’t know, sorry. In my experience, the browser-based uploads are never very stable and the desktop apps just work better. If I had to guess, maybe the browser apps just aren’t coded very well for big transfers over HTTP: Maybe they don’t support resuming, maybe they don’t retry lost packets as often as they should (or at all). They’re mostly intended, I believe, for smaller file uploads, not entire hard drives worth of data.
You can try the “Choose files” button on Dropbox instead of using drag and drop, but I dunno if that’d be any better.
I’m not quite following. Google or Dropbox? Create a new local folder and then what? How do I get the folders/files from the NAS to Google/Chrome via the desktop version without first copying them to a local drive? Sorry to be a bit daft here…
Just to be a bit clearer: Dropbox creates a folder where you tell it to. I assume your NAS can be accessed like any network drive. If so, put your Dropbox folder there. Move/copy/link the files you want to upload into that folder, and the Dropbox app should upload everything.
So I have dropbox create a new folder. Does it need to be on the same drive? Regardless, let’s say things go smoothly and I create a new folder on the NAS (I mapped it, so Windows generally treats it like a drive).
Then I create a logical/soft link (is there a difference) to the folders I want to upload. This avoids copying everything either on the NAS or locally, but dropbox will follow the link to the source files elsewhere on the drive and upload those.
When I want to access a file on the road, drobox will give me the original file, not hte link.
Lastly, I haven’t created a logical link in ages–I’m crossing my fingers that Windows has a GUI mechanism …