The LAST program I have to have on my personal computer preventing me from going to Linux is my Google Drive which I use to sync important documents and pictures off my local drive (in case of drive failure or flood, etc.) I’ve searched and can’t find anything official that autonomously syncs a folder to my Google Drive like the official client does on Windows. Am I overlooking something? If not, can anyone recommend anything reputable similar to Google Drive?
I’m sure this will spark a debate, but this is family pictures and movies I simply cannot afford to lose - I would be beyond devastated to find out I’ve lost my kids pictures when inevitably my local hard drive fails or there’s a fire. I trust Google so I am reluctant to switch unless I have to.
I sympathize, but given their awful record on dropping projects, regard any optimism Google will maintain your treasured files for any extended time as odd.
Anyway, quite a number of cloud providers have abruptly ended services; giving users perhaps a month to take their things and go. It might be more durable to hire some website hosting and form your own private cloud.
I’ve been using Google Drive on a Ubuntu laptop through the web page application - not perfectly smooth, but it works. Files retrieved from the drive go into the laptop’s Downloads directory, and I don’t think there’s any way to change that, but it’s no big deal. Just need to move the files from Downloads to where they belong.
The web page can preview a lot of the files stored on the drive, including displaying the contents of tar.gz archive files. It’s a tiny bit screwy: there’s a special ‘back’ button for closing the pdf previewer. Clicking the browser’s back button won’t close the previewer but will instead navigate through the drive ‘underneath’ the previewer window. I’ve learned to recognize that mistake after I’ve made it.
Nothing lasts forever, but I’d say that Google as an institution should probably last awhile. Hey, we take our chances every day. IMHO, FWIW.
The beauty of the desktop client on windows is that I have don’t have to do anything other than put all of my files in my Google Drive folder on my desktop and I know that they are synced. Unfortunately, it looks like either of those solutions would require more manual work than I would like.
Dropbox is the other one I have obviously heard of. It’s not that I especially trust Google, but a quick search yields what seems like countless “Mega Cloud XL blah blah” providers that give 50 GiB free and I question their security and/or long-term sustainability. I have less of those concerns with Google and even Dropbox.
Thanks, the InSync tool and OverGrive sound promising but I may be better off doing some more research and switching to Dropbox…I am just hesitant to have to upload 500 GiB of data to another service.
Thank you for the information! If I decide to switch, I’ll report back with what I learn.
The Dropbox guys are pretty competent. This is their core business and they’ve hired the technical musclepower to be good at it. I read an article about the technical effort they went through to move out of Amazon’s Cloud, and do so without disrupting their customers while the transition occurred, which is a pretty enormous feat and they did accomplish it.
I’ve been a customer for a long time. It’s been a good service. Some people seem to hate Dropbox with a passion, but none of them have ever been willing to give me any particular reason for that position. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with poor prior experiences, just a hatred for putting documents on a remote server or something.
Not disagreeing at all, but this bit raises an interesting point.
Imagine that Google did announce that Google Drive was shutting off in just a month. Do they have the bandwidth, and does the rest of the world have the free disk space, to accommodate every single GD user downloading their GD content to their local computers followed by re-uploading it to some other provider?
Are we getting to the point that cloud providers need to be regulated in the same way that banks are? Are they now “too big to fail” as businesses with tolerable levels of collateral damage to the rest of society?
Banks and other financial entities also have a lot of regulation that in IT speak would be called SLAs. Regulations that ensure their internal processes are reliable enough and audited enough that they’re sure they’ll be able to take a licking & keep on ticking. Are we ready to need these things for cloud services and ISPs?
Since we almost certainly won’t enact such regulations except on the heels of the first major disaster, what sort of disaster will it be? And when? i.e., Glass-Steagall (Glass–Steagall legislation - Wikipedia) was the regulatory reaction to the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression. What will be the nature of the corresponding Internet / Cloud disaster & response?
In practice, 90% of Drive users will never see the announcement and won’t much care that their files are gone. I use it as a backup-backup to the Windows cloud service - I forget what that’s called - and I use Dropbox for professional documents I need to store. Other than mobile camera uploads, nearly all of what’s in my Drive is files other people have shared with me that I no longer have a need for - law school group project assignments, even planning spreadsheets and so forth.
Plus, let’s imagine one gigantic provider — not Google because they renounced Satan and all his works — being so all powerful in computing and internet terms they actually could actually hold people’s files hostage for more money. The Golden Dream behind thin computing as earlier the goal of Microsoft and Oracle, corrupted into pure greed.
I can’t imagine the present or any previous congresses valiantly standing up for consumers’ rights; or particularly noticing.
Not Google.
Google Drive is an integral part of Google’s office suite (Google Docs, Google Sheets etc). And I think it’s necessary for Chromebooks as well. There’s no way they’d kill all of these.
Also, if you are using their client on a desktop computer, you already have a copy of all the files on your hard drive. If you don’t use it on a desktop, you probably don’t have much data on it - you must be only using it for Google Docs and some smartphone files.
It’s the idea that millions (billions?) of people collectively have petabytes (yottabytes?) of data in somebody’s cloud that may or may not be on their local machine(s). Which individual people would each have an individual logistical problem to retrieve their data in the face of an impending service shutdown regardless of the reason.
And when a hefty fraction of a billion people simultaneously have the same individual problem, odds are that’s going to manifest as a whole bunch of other collective problems as well.