Experiences in Google Drive land. Hint: It's shit

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This was/is a thread I’ve had running on the Elements forum, the results (for me) are in so I figured I’d put the details here, for reference for others looking.

This was the initial post:

I know in the past, like some years ago, I tried syncing projects across varioius machines with Google Drive and had issues with projects getting corrupted. So, I went back to Dropbox, with which I’ve never had an issue. But. Dropbox is getting more and more expensive, and I get a chunk of Drive space with my subscription to Gemini, their AI engine, so I’m considering moving back.

Is anyone doing this over Drive? If so, any issues?

There was some chat, but nothing concrete from anyone, so I went ahead and tried it. This is what I’ve just posted to update the thread.

UPDATE: I’m updating this thread in case others find it in a search.

TL;DR: Google Drive is not a reliable syncing solution for my needs. I’m sticking with Dropbox.

I have been testing Google Drive’s sync capabilities with the aim of moving over from Dropbox, and for me, it’s been a complete failure.

I tested it on my two backup machines: an M1 Mac Mini and an M1 MacBook Air.

I started by setting up the Mac Mini, copying 275 GB of files from Dropbox to the local Google Drive folder. I set everything to “Make Available Offline.” It took about three days and four restarts to finally sync everything. Once it was synced, however, it appeared to work correctly. When I opened a RapidWeaver Classic (RWC) project, worked on it, and saved it, the new version synced to the Google Drive cloud without any issues.

After a few weeks, I decided to introduce the MacBook Air.

First off, I could never get it to sync successfully. The initial attempt to make all files available offline failed time after time. I then switched to streaming files (online-only) and made only select folders available offline. This method worked, so long as the folders I was syncing weren’t too large.

Eventually, I had enough folders synced to test syncing an RWC project file between the machines. Here’s what happened:

  1. I opened the project on the Mac Mini, made an edit, saved it, and closed it.
  2. The changed file synced to the cloud just fine and reasonably quickly.
  3. However, as soon as Google Drive tried to sync the new version from the cloud to the MacBook Air, it deleted the project file from the MBA entirely. It didn’t even have the decency to sync a corrupted version; it just straight up deleted it.

The new version was still safe in the cloud, so I manually downloaded it, but the file was corrupted and wouldn’t open.

So, from my experience, it’s safe to say Google Drive does not work well. It completely messed up the RWC project (which was somewhat expected), and on top of that, the syncing process itself was incredibly messy.

Hope this helps someone.

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I stopped using Google drive many years ago, for very similar reasons. And yes, i now use the expensive Dropbox for the 1TB plus family media files andsuch. However i still use icloud for my Rapidweaver projects, and day to day files.

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iCloud generally works, but every so often it simply stops working and I have to rely on SUVnet to sync file between machines (10mile round trip).

On a related note - warning to all about iCloud…

I am finding it very hard to quantify the exact cause of this. I have been using the Apple ecosystem for nigh on 30 years and .Mac / iCloud have always had issues. Recently I have noticed random contacts missing, days after they have been added to the Contacts app. Yesterday, I actually caught the issue in real time.

Add Contact on MacOS (15.5)

Expectation > will propagate to iCloud / Other devices > 50% of time, this happens

Reality < 50% chance Contact will be deleted from Mac OS

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I agree with what you are saying. I do have to be careful with icloud. I watch to make sure icloud completes the sync process. It can sometimes just sit there and i could easily assume the files will be sync’d. Then if i go to my laptop to keep working on things, the recent changes are not there. I have tried a few others like Sync and found similar issues though.

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I’ve not tried iCloud for non-Apple files for ages, but last time I did it wasn’t successful. I do use it for photos and Apple docs, and it’s flawless.

I guess that syncing files is what Dropbox does, so it focuses 100% on it. Whereas for the rest it’s a bolt-on, and so gets treated as such (ie. The best people don’t work on it!).