Anything can happen. We're always at the mercy of the busines decisions of our technology providers. In this case Google can keep the protocol stable and stop supporting the client to the point it stops working after an update of your distro. If you want to be nearly 100% safe you self host whatever the price and the time you have to pour in. Personally I use Syncthing over my home network.
rclone does work, and quite well, but it's not a sync client; it lets you do a one-off upload/download, or FUSE-mount, neither of which are quite the same thing
You could use a systemd timer (or similar) to run sync once a minute or something along those lines. Its not quite the same, but for most peoples purposes itd probably be fine.
In the meantime you can use rclone, which is a fantastic tool for accessing cloud storage/ftp/sftp/anything with a single tool, including the ability to encrypt and cache data as well as mount volumes via FUSE.
This seems to be the lesson of Google. If you depend on the service, find someone else and pay them. Too many services are decommissioned, and if they are replaced it often is very different. Outside of search/email, it is a risk
The uncertainty is the problem. Until recently I had fairly slow broadband, weeks to sync initially. Changing providers is often do it again, loose history either way, or pay another provider per GB to do it.
The lack of official Linux client was the killer for me years ago, but prior to fibre internet the uncertainty was a big issue too.
People want to plan around services like this remaining. Nothing is certain, but the news quite often talks about Google dropping another service.
I also read somewhere (can't find the link now) that there is an internal gDrive client used by google employees (maybe an (ex-)employee can comment) but which was never released
Syncthing is awesome. The next feature I hope they'll manage to get in is "encrypted devices", to allow the use of VPS and other less-trusted devices without losing much in terms of security.
I would be really uneasy to let a third-party have access to my files, when there are such good alternatives.
Forget Google Drive. Just run Nextcloud on your own VPS. I put mine on a digitalocean VPS and it costs me $5 a month for ~20GB of storage.
Nextcloud has great sync clients for linux, iPhone and Windows. (It has clients for Mac and Android too, although I've never used them.) And google doesn't get access to my data or metadata.
There are OpenVPN clients for android that I use to access private LAN resources.
But I have in fact also left my nextcloud on the web. I'm not that worried.
Just have to stay informed on any big vulns, and I also stay as many releases as I can behind the bleeding edge. That helped me avoid the recent fidokey issue.
This is kind of a weird statement to make.. if I have photos, important documents, etc.. why would I not pay 5 extra dollars a month to host them on a service that offers more durability than I can guarantee doing it myself? It’s not like it’s so prohibitively expensive that only a business could do it.
Well it's a VPS that I use for more than just nextcloud. And I don't use all the storage I already pay for. If I needed more, I could pay $0.10 per GB for additional storage
Google drive and dropbox are better deals for storage, so I can see why they'd be attractive for people who need more.
Exactly... you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
For $10 you can get Dropbox (2 TB) data, so I dunno if saving that $5 is worth it in this case. You get the Linux client, and far more reliability in every aspect.
I think, if I really would want to go setting up my own thing to save money, setting/writing some service backed by object storage (AWS S3) would be cheaper and reliable enough.
The last-straw motivating reason I switched to nextcloud was because dropbox decided they wouldn't let me sync my files to an ecryptfs file system. (I believe they recanted on this policy a few months later.) I didn't like being held hostage to their bad design decisions, so I left and found a solution that worked better for me. Dropbox has also had some serious security vulnerabilities [1], which left me feeling less than confident in their ability to manage my personal data.
Thanks for the heads up, I see this confirmed at https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste... under the list of supported file systems on Linux (which is currently ext4, zfs and xfs on 64 bit systems, eCryptFS backed by ext4, and btrfs).
Yes; I've been using Dropbox with btrfs on Arch Linux for a month or two now. According to the Arch wiki[1], Dropbox added support back for ZFS, ecryptfs, XFS, and btrfs a little over a year ago (around seven months after they initially dropped support for everything other than ext4 on Linux). That being said, I had been using Nextcloud on a DigitalOcean droplet for a couple years before that, and I never had any issues with it. The only reason I switched back to Dropbox was that Google announced earlier this year they were getting rid of Google Play Music, and I had a bunch of music uploaded from CDs on there that I wanted to back up, and I would have ended up needing to pay more per month for the storage on a DigitalOcean instance to fit all the music than the $10/month that Dropbox charges for 2 TB.
or iCloud or Google Drive which are even cheaper IIRC with more plans. But people commenting here for this post, probably care about services that support Linux.
Nextcloud supports S3 as external storage. So it, and its app, are essentially S3 frontends.
I use nextcloud but I already have a k8s cluster where I host my stuff like calendars, notes, decks, S3.
One 10Gi volume is 1USD/month where I host mine. Yes, more expensive, but I don't need 2TB and also how come Dropbox can offer storage that cheap? What's their incentive?
Also I still use my Google account and if I add it into Fedora my Google drive appears in the Gnome file manager. So I'm confused about the lack of Gdrive client, I assume they mean from Google. But all Google has to do is expose APIs and docs and someone else will write one.
Blackblaze is at $0.005/GB/Month (so 10$ for 2TB) and they still make a profit out of it. I have no doubt Dropbox can make a profit out of users barely filling their 2TB limit then.
>For $10 you can get Dropbox (2 TB) data, so I dunno if saving that $5 is worth it in this case. You get the Linux client, and far more reliability in every aspect.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
The comment your responding to is actually a toungue-in-cheek reference to the original Dropbox announcement on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Yes I know that. The issue around just using one VM is that it is single point of failure IMO. Yes, is unlikely that VM will die, and yes, the VM image itself is likely backed by reliable storage (they are supposed to be disposable IIRC, you'd ideally want to attach some kind of volume which is extra $$$ -- correct me if I'm wrong here).
That said, my point was with little extra money -- features such as easy sharing, security, versioning, nice mobile apps, and time saved moving around things manually (like photos), offline access (and if you use rsync cron, not worrying about conflicts) etc makes it worth that extra few $$$.
You need your own domain and set up GSuite Business account on it or a subdomain. Included in the offer: Google Drive - Unlimited cloud storage. The "or 1TB per user if fewer than 5 users" bit is not technically enforced. Even if it were, I think $60/month is still very competitive if you need to store dozens of terabytes.
Sticker price currently $12/month but there are also discounted offers available if you look for them
Nextcloud syncing works like shit for me and the client apps don't impress. I'm planning on dumping it for Google Drive soon enough (since I don't need Linux support) since at least it's cheaper.
Interestingly, it does exist as a fuse driver, as can be seen in ChromeOS if you try to open a file (say a PDF) from Drive in the browser, it shows a file path of /media/fuse/.../ . Google have just chosen not to release it publically.
> If I could <use standard protocol or API reliably>, Google would earn more of my money.
This is wishful thinking. Across their product line Google extends and abuses common standards, or more frequently rolls their own parallel which dominates by virtue of convenience and userbase.
Try using an organizational (GSuite) Google Calendar account from any app that isn't Google Calendar, and it'll quickly become clear that this use-case simply isn't optimized for. Simple things like sharing calendars with write access don't work without finding a particular settings page that hasn't been updated since 2009.
There is also no API for room reservation systems if an organization is using Google Calendar for those that I can find.
And of course, need I mention the casualties of RSS compatible Reader and XMPP/Jabber compatible GTalk?
The parallel to Microsoft's 90s EEE modus operandi is plainly evident. But with Google, it even stretches into web standards. Google has shown little interest in being a good citizen of an open protocol-based ecosystem, except at first to get new users into the walls before they close the gates.
Google also promised a tool to migrate regular accounts to GSuite accounts on Google Plus, since GSuite accounts weren't supported when Google Plus launched. (What kind of lunatic company would support its paying customers? I still can't leave Google Play reviews for the same reason).
I naievely kept using my regular account, even when GSuite accounts became possible, because of course Google would deliver on this promise. Never happened. Seven years later, Google Plus shut down.
Supporting all the weird combinations of kernels and desktop environments and such must be a pain. There was an (internal only) FUSE client, but, as a good google3 binary, had a ton of internal stuff linked, and those can't get out of corp desktop/laptops (might not even work, who knows).
This is actually not a hard problem at all. Slack, Steam, heck even Google Chrome have no problems across various distros, and all have pretty good toolbar icon support, notifications, etc.
I've never used rclone but according to the OneDrive Client for Linux (OCL) maintainer it does support OneDrive Personal, Business, Office365 and Sharepoint including shared folders for Personal and Business. It also fully supports Azure National Cloud Deployments.
To get the key you need to use the web browser to complete the set up.
What Google product managers meant to write was “We will release as soon as we hit the year of the ‘Linux on the Desktop’”. I say, they are still waiting..
The google drive OSX client is surprisingly lack luster, as it’s merely mounted like a pseudo drive rather than even meeting the standard Dropbox met years ago. Given that they won’t write a decent OSX client, I’m unsurprised they haven’t followed through on their promises to an even less popular OS.
You... don't want their clients, to be honest. I've seen some serious team-breaking bugs all because someone's mouse slipped and a team folder was dragged to a recycle bin.
What does the client need to do?
Which would be more useful, desktop GUI or command line?
Would it be ok if the client runs on the jvm?
Should it be deployed as a systemd service?
It won't ever come. I use InSync on ubuntu and it works exceptionally well. I actually upgraded to the paid 200GB Google drive plan because I started using Drive dramatically more once I installed InSync.
Insync is outstanding (https://www.insynchq.com/). It's better than the native Google Backup and Sync and works in Linux with multiple desktop variants. It also syncs MS OneDrive. One time purchase. It works great.
114 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadMount?
>handles interruption/resume of syncing.
"Transfers over limited bandwidth; intermittent connections, or subject to quota can be restarted, from the last good file transferred."
https://rclone.org/
one of my absolute top GOTO tools.
I'm feel pretty secure that it won't be, but I've heard enough horror stories that I would have a backup strategy.
The lack of official Linux client was the killer for me years ago, but prior to fibre internet the uncertainty was a big issue too.
People want to plan around services like this remaining. Nothing is certain, but the news quite often talks about Google dropping another service.
[1] https://github.com/odeke-em/drive
I would be really uneasy to let a third-party have access to my files, when there are such good alternatives.
Nextcloud has great sync clients for linux, iPhone and Windows. (It has clients for Mac and Android too, although I've never used them.) And google doesn't get access to my data or metadata.
[1] https://nextcloud.com
You would get way more than 20 GB.
But I have in fact also left my nextcloud on the web. I'm not that worried.
Just have to stay informed on any big vulns, and I also stay as many releases as I can behind the bleeding edge. That helped me avoid the recent fidokey issue.
If you need it for business, pay for it and go to AWS, Backblaze, GCP, Dropbox, etc.
Google drive and dropbox are better deals for storage, so I can see why they'd be attractive for people who need more.
A 250GB SSD is what? 30$ these days?
You could buy a lot of SSD's for that over the course of a year, and have the storage local.
Sidenote: Look how tiny that item ID is in the URL!
I think, if I really would want to go setting up my own thing to save money, setting/writing some service backed by object storage (AWS S3) would be cheaper and reliable enough.
https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-linux-ext4-only/
[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/21/dropbox-lets-any...
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dropbox#Using_Dropbox_w...
I use nextcloud but I already have a k8s cluster where I host my stuff like calendars, notes, decks, S3.
One 10Gi volume is 1USD/month where I host mine. Yes, more expensive, but I don't need 2TB and also how come Dropbox can offer storage that cheap? What's their incentive?
Also I still use my Google account and if I add it into Fedora my Google drive appears in the Gnome file manager. So I'm confused about the lack of Gdrive client, I assume they mean from Google. But all Google has to do is expose APIs and docs and someone else will write one.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
It's not to be taken seriously.
That said, my point was with little extra money -- features such as easy sharing, security, versioning, nice mobile apps, and time saved moving around things manually (like photos), offline access (and if you use rsync cron, not worrying about conflicts) etc makes it worth that extra few $$$.
It’s about ~$49/yr in my country and even though I hate to deal with OneDrive compared to Dropbox, can’t beat the price as I anyway buy Office 365.
On the thread's subject, I use rclone to access it - works great.
You need your own domain and set up GSuite Business account on it or a subdomain. Included in the offer: Google Drive - Unlimited cloud storage. The "or 1TB per user if fewer than 5 users" bit is not technically enforced. Even if it were, I think $60/month is still very competitive if you need to store dozens of terabytes.
Sticker price currently $12/month but there are also discounted offers available if you look for them
Dropbox is the best syncing solution technically, though GDrive is probably competitive.
Fuse driver wrapper
If I could NFS-mount Drive from within fstab, Google would earn even more of my money.
This is wishful thinking. Across their product line Google extends and abuses common standards, or more frequently rolls their own parallel which dominates by virtue of convenience and userbase.
Try using an organizational (GSuite) Google Calendar account from any app that isn't Google Calendar, and it'll quickly become clear that this use-case simply isn't optimized for. Simple things like sharing calendars with write access don't work without finding a particular settings page that hasn't been updated since 2009.
There is also no API for room reservation systems if an organization is using Google Calendar for those that I can find.
And of course, need I mention the casualties of RSS compatible Reader and XMPP/Jabber compatible GTalk?
The parallel to Microsoft's 90s EEE modus operandi is plainly evident. But with Google, it even stretches into web standards. Google has shown little interest in being a good citizen of an open protocol-based ecosystem, except at first to get new users into the walls before they close the gates.
Standards compliance is good for customers. What is good for customers is ultimately good for the company.
I naievely kept using my regular account, even when GSuite accounts became possible, because of course Google would deliver on this promise. Never happened. Seven years later, Google Plus shut down.
If you want to compare, compare to Dropbox.
[1] https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/
[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/office-365/onedrive-o...
To get the key you need to use the web browser to complete the set up.