Coincidence? Surely Google knows this is a legitimate company.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’m ok with subscription cloud storage provided it’s easy to move everything off of it to somewhere else and they don’t make me jump through ridiculous hopes to access it.

    I was paying for Google drive until they killed the Back Up and Sync desktop app. The original app let you sync any individual file in any directory, and you could pick and choose how each was synced.

    Then they killed that and replaced it with a desktop app they have now that creates a Google partition of sorts that the user can’t enter, shoves all your files in it, and forces you to use the app to manage what files are currently sitting on your own computer.

    You can still do the individual syncing I think but you can’t pick and choose which files are synced and which stay on the cloud. You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      I got all the rest and I see your issue with wanting to sync only individual files. But I didn’t quite get what you mean with this: “…that the user can’t enter”. You can enter and copy/move/edit files… I cannot understand what you meant with that.

      Regarding the sync thing, I am not as annoyed by it as much as you seem, and my use case probably was different, but in case it helps somebody what I opted to was to use it as a disk and use tools that work with disks, so in my case although other tools could be used I use FreeFileSync to copy files from the Drive to a local drive and viceversa. Mostly for backup purposes.

      I would be tempted to say in some cases it is even better as in the past you needed to to use their APIs or use their tool to setup those specific sync options and now I can use any tool that works with copying/using normal files.

      That said… for other environments like a server or similar, then you are back to RClone and API auths or similar to do actions on your drive.

      You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.

      This is me just nitpicking, but you can flag folders/files to be available offline and it will keep a local copy always, but it will be in their drive thingy. So you can access it even when offline but it’s not copied outside their virtual disk. It’s just a right click menu option.

    • Tangent5280@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Makes sense. Are there any alternatives which lets you pick and choose which objects to sync on the file level? I didn’t really know that was an option except for finangling rsync with cron jobs or something.