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Tag Archives: google drive

Convert your Mac from a Rabbit to a Tortoise

25 Sep

I went to the Genius Bar on Sunday because I cracked the glass on my iPhone and the mouse on my wife’s MacBook was not working (swelling battery maybe) and then there was the performance on my MacBook Air that was just sucking!

The results are in. Google drive uses craploads of memory and CPU; Little Snitch (3 beta) is not much different. As a result the system is just so super sluggish. I understand the issue with little snitch. Heck it’s beta software.  But my concerns for Google Drive’s performance are all over the place. They do not have an auto updater and they do not display the current version number in the preferences pane. They do not support a ‘start paused’ option either.

I have a number of there product concerns with GD but I’m confident that they will never be heard. I like the storage capacity and there are other tools for accessing and syncing (cyberduck) so I think I’ll go that way instead.

PS: Make sure that the firewall is turned on. The latest version of OSX disables it. I’m not certain whether that has been the default but it is now.

 
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Posted by on 2012/09/25 in Tools

 

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Google Drive stopped working on my OSX Mountain Lion install

27 Jul

It’s a long title be that did not change anything. Apple has sandboxed the OS. “We” expected that to happen but my memory says there was not going to be a workaround. Luckily: http://osxdaily.com/tag/mac-os-x-10-8/

I did not read the entire article; just the parts that interested me and my problem. Which was that OSX popped up a dialog saying that Google Drive was not downloaded from the app store or not provided by an identified developer. I suppose that last part will be corrected by Google eventually. In the meantime use the link above to install Google Drive.

I had to change the switch to allow “anything”.  But once Google Drive was installed I was able to move the selection back to the middle position and it still functioned.

One more thing. The current version of google drive is: 1.3.3209.2688. This is good to know because Google does not offer any other way to ID the different google drive versions.

 
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Posted by on 2012/07/27 in Complaint Depatment

 

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Between DropBox and Google Drive

06 May

It’s too easy to compare these products features and functions. They are, in fact, fairly similar. It’s also easy to find reasons to bash one over the other for things like the terms of service.

I’ll admit I jumped on the Google Drive as soon as it arrived. In fact I’m running both. I’m still concerned about the quality of the google sync, the lack of documentation, and iPhone app. and let’s not forget google’s recent recent fickleness toward it’s other properties.

In this stage of the game I have a taste of desktop unification that I really like it. The challenge is getting all those rough edges sanded down in a favorable way.

Google clearly has a bias toward android so will we get a premium iPhone app? Don’t know that there is incentive. If not then DropBox needs to acquire some apps.

 
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Posted by on 2012/05/06 in Tools

 

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Google drive support page useless

28 Apr

Google drive is close to dropbox but adds support for syncing google docs.

Google’s support for the application is severely limited. There is little or no indication of any type of errors. I still have 100 files missing on my target system.

Dropbox is much more reliable.

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/28 in Tools, web

 

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Google Drive – just not syncing everything

26 Apr

[Update 2012-04-28] It was looking like over 100 files failed to sync. And I discovered a couple of things. (a) Google Drive’s desktop app for OSX does not replicate the .DS_Store file. (Yippee). (b) is also appears that if you “touch” or change the file’s timestamp, that is not enough to trigger a “re-copy”. (c) does not copy or process symlinks.

Google Drive is mostly working… but it is simply not syncing all of my files reliably. This would be a critical flaw and a single reason to go back to DropBox.

Yesterday a couple of files were in the Google Drive menu as “failed to upload for unknown reason”. Strangely enough the files were already uploaded and they had been downloaded by one of the other machines. They were Google App files (gdoc and gsheet), however, the sync indicator was on the files and the parent folder icon. What was that all about?

Now I have files with the sync icon all over my filesystem instead of the checkmark. This is a fundamental function/behavior that should not happen.

Sorry I do not have any recommendations… I really like the unified filesystem. It’s so much better than what DropBox does. What that means is that many of the files are just stubs that cause the Google Apps to launch and open the file or do some other action. I’m hoping that this “sparse” file system is extended to regular files.

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/26 in web

 

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Google Drive – ToS cannot stand the test

26 Apr

Some writers have criticized the Terms of Service for Google Drive.It’s nice that someone has time, energy and a law degree in order to take them to task. But while it’s nice to throw rocks at Goliath I’m not certain that they are going to get any real remedy as the ToS is critically flawed in my opinion… sort of a poison pill.

First and formost the ToS requires that I relinquish some rights to the material I’m uploading or allowing to be processed by Google’s services. (a) this is very similar to the verbiage to the other cloud file servers. This is because they are going to compress and uncompress the files in order to be efficient on their side and it’s sort of a request to hold them harmless in a sense because they make mistakes and shit happens sort of a thing… sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. (b) since I/we have been are likely to uploading documents that have various types of licenses assigned to me/you/us that are non-transferable … just because I said it was ok is not going to make it so.

Anyway, this argument and ones like it have already been bantered about with Box, DropBox, SugarSync, and CrashPlan among others. Frankly I do not think that Google is going to read the email you sent with the family recipe for Oatmeal Cookies and open a bakery. (take 5 minutes and do a little light reading on the internet email systems. Most of the email systems are in the clear. Like sending a letter to your grandmother and when it gets to the postoffice someone opens the letter and then sends the letter inside to the postoffice closest to her home. The the postmaster puts it in a new envelope and delivers it to her house. But this only describes some of the ways email is delivered.)

On the other hand a little paranoia is a good thing.

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/26 in architecture, Tools, web

 

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Google Drive – cannot sign in

25 Apr

I’ve been having trouble signing into my Google Drive and I finally figured it out.

(a) Google started updating my account several hours ago. Or maybe not. Anyway, I went to http://drive.google.com and signed up for notification. I assume that maybe this put me on a list somewhere.

(b) I finally received my invitation and a link to download and install google drive desktop app. And so I did.

(c) When I launched Google Drive… (1) it took a while to load and to show up on the task switcher. (2) when the login screen was displayed the account/email address was pre-filled and I only had to enter my password.

However, no matter what I entered the screen never processed my password. I tried downloading a fresh copy and then re-installing it. Sadly that had no effect.

There was a HELP link on the login screen. When I clicked on it my network monitoring program, little snitch, complained that an app was trying to access the network. What caught my attention was that there were some video artifacts that suggested that there was something shared between Google Drive and Google Chrome.

(d) I quit google Chrome

(e) restarted Google Drive and was able to signin

(f) restarted Google Chrome.

Now everything is working well. I’m not certain what happened… My intuition suggests that there must have been a shared library or install file that collided. Anyway it’s syncing now.

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/25 in architecture, Tools

 

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Google App Drive Space

25 Apr

People have been reporting that their Google Docs account has 10GB… and they are supposing that this is on account of the upcoming Google Drive. I tried to download Google Drive but I get this youtube video to watch and a “notify me” link. And when I’m on my gmail account I see the storage meter advancing.

When I first created my gmail account I had about 7GB of free space. Over the last 2 days It has grown to 9GB. I like the additional space although I recently upgraded my account so that I had 25GB storage for my docs.

On the one hand you’d think that all of these applications would share the same storage; but I guess not.

Now that I’m running around in circles … is Google really adding 100MB an hour to my account or is this more of an animation like a progress meter so that I get some sense that something is going on in the background as they get around to my account?

I dunno…

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/25 in beta, Tools

 

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