Drive

I'm still loving the new things Google Drive can do and the new things I've learned it can do, but I'm also learning to distrust the Google Drive local sync folder/application. It works pretty well as a dropbox for transferring files between computers but it doesn't work well as a directory to work from, because when it finds conflicts between files it seems to proliferate copies of them in arbitrary ways, and also prune them in arbitrary ways. It seems to remember that at one point I removed a folder of drafts from the drive on my desktop (I put it back) and this morning when I turned on my laptop I found it responded to that fact by removing the folder from my Google Drive folder on the laptop, even though I'd worked in and modified the files inside it since then.

Luckily I'd copied my work on the laptop last night, but it was still a little heart-stopping to turn on the desktop and see the folder gone, then go up to the laptop and find it was gone there, too.

So what I think I'm going to have to do to avoid this kind of thing is just use it a file transfer mechanism, put a zip folder in it each day with the date in the name so that there's never a conflict and so my "working copy" is never in there.

It's a little disappointing, since this makes it only marginally more convenient than other methods of file transfer... I was really enjoying being able to have a folder that would just act like a normal folder except for being in multiple computers. But losing work? I've already lost about an hour to dealing with this, making sure that everything I've added to the Drive is backed up locally on multiple computers and trying to figure out what caused it.

I'm looking at Google Drive's troubleshooting help stuff and it says that when something is deleted online it goes to the recycling bin on the local computer, and that actually does seem to be the case... there's the folder in my trash here. I just don't understand why Drive decided I'd deleted it.

Googling (heh, irony) suggests this is not an uncommon problem... some of the people complaining that Google deleted local files were people who synced their files to a new computer, left them in the Google Drive folder, and then deleted them from the online version of Google Drive without the understanding that this, too, would sync. But some of it's stuff like a sync got interrupted so only a few files downloaded, and then when the sync started again it treated the almost empty version as the definitive...

All of this is fairly consistent with my experience of Google Drive's general glitchiness, counterintuitiveness, and user-unfriendliness.

To be clear, this applies only to the offline sync folder. The Google Drive in-browser offline editor is mostly great once one gets it working...the inability to create new documents seems both random and unintended, but otherwise the program works as advertised and expected. I actually think I'm going to be investigating other dropbox-style programs (like... Dropbox). The advantages of Google Drive being tied to... Google Drive... aren't actually that important compared to its drawbacks. I use the browser app for my Google docs and the folder for things that aren't native to Google. There's no reason they couldn't be separate things.

Update: In fact, I've just installed Dropbox after seeing on their website that they recommend users move their files into Dropbox and work directly out of it... I'm not going to immediately drop the habit of backing things up locally outside of it, but this is what I'm looking for, a folder I can work in without having to think about "Okay, where is my most recent copy saved?"

Friday, August 17th

The Daily Report

After some issues with Google Drive's local sync folder program, I'm investigating Dropbox... this is the sort of thing it probably would have been useful for me to get into a long time ago, but it took Google telling me, "Hey, we have this thing you might like..." to get me to think about it. Ultimately I don't think Google's version is quite "there" (see previous post) but I like the idea. Dropbox seems to be the big name, the Kleenex or Xerox of the concept, so I'm starting with them, but if anybody has any success/horror stories about any cloud storage solution please feel free to share.

To be very specific, I'm not looking for storage space (when text is your medium, you don't need gigs out the Yahoo) but convenience, specifically the convenience of having a local working drive that syncs between multiple computers.

But that's enough about that.

Some fairly exciting internal developments are... developing. As dissatisfied as I am with Google Drive's sync program, I am still loving the in-browser word processor's offline capabilities. I've only been doing it for part of this week so I'm resisting the urge to make plans/predictions about where it's going to take me, but for now I'll just say: things are trending upwards.

And as rocky as my experience with the local version of Drive has been, it hasn't been fruitless... I'm much closer on some of my goals because of it. Hopefully Dropbox will help me get the rest of the way there.

The State of the Me

Weather continues to be fairly nice. We seem to be well and truly done with the 100+ degree weather. I'm doing my sleeping in shifts most nights, crashing hard sometime between 9 and 11 at night and sleeping for three or four hours then waking up for a few hours and then sleeping for four or five more. Other than my nights ending rather abruptly I'm not seeing any ill effects... the conventional wisdom of "eight hours of sleep" ideally being an uninterrupted block are actually a result of social evolution rather than biological, so if this is how my body wants to be for the time being I'm going to let it.

Plans For Today

Having to remind myself that it's day 3 of the chapter cycle on Tales of MU, since I just posted something yesterday. I have more OT stories on tap and I've got a development cycle for them that I think makes sense. When I first started the 4 day cycle for main MU I was trying to fit in a floating weekly cycle alongside it and it just didn't work. What I'm doing now is a kind of inversion of the main MU schedule. On the days I'm writing the bulk of and the chapter (like today), I'll get a start on the OT when I need a break. On the days that are fairly slack on the main chapter cycle, I'll write the bulk of the OT. This is not going to be anything like perfectly sustainable because the main chapter has to take precedence, but it only has to work out half the time for me to have an OT after every other MU chapter.

So I've got 1,500 words of MU chapter to write today and 500 words of the next OT, and I'll be crossing one of my goals off for the first half off August.

By the way, if anyone else is thinking of moving into cloud syncing...

...if you use my Dropbox referral link we'll both get an extra 500 MB free.

I would probably never exhaust the free 2GB, especially since I'll still probably use Google Drive for bulky media file transfers (Dropbox will be my work account when it comes to syncing/sharing), but I won't pass up free stuff.

As I write this post...

...the folder on my Google Drive from which earlier a very important folder had vanished is empty.

It had had two folders and a zipped up copy of both folders I made earlier today, thinking "Okay, I'll never do anything with these, they will remain unique and therefore never conflict with anything and always be there."

And they're gone. Well, they're in the recycling bin, which is where Google Drive puts something it decides you've gotten rid of. Which is how I know I didn't absentmindedly move rather than copy them into the Dropbox folder.

I've moved it right back because while I'm getting used to Dropbox (and making triple sure it doesn't have the same issues) I want to make sure that I have my vital files in as many places as possible

I understand the reasoning behind rebranding Google Docs as Google Drive... if the Drive program hadn't been connected to my familiar Docs interface I never would have thought to try it, but I feel like I'm in a really weird place right now because on the one hand Google Drive (the online office suite) is one of my favorite things ever and getting better but on the other hand Google Drive (the local-to-cloud-to-local syncing program) is such a wibbly-wobbly ball of faily-waily stuff.

The really hilarious thing about it all is that it's only because of the improvements to the "Gdocs" version of Google Drive that I've had the time to mess about with the sync version of Drive... though in absolute fairness to the company/brand, it's only because I was messing about with the sync version that I found out about the offline capabilities of the "docs" version.

The final analysis for the week is that I'm very glad that I tried the Google Drive syncing service because it's where I first learned that I could use the in-browser word processor offline (although it was a hassle to get it working and literally nothing I've done has been able to make the Drive sync program detect that offline editing is enabled) and because it got me looking at the advantages of a sync folder.