Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive

What surprises me most is the fact that there seems to be very little interest in meta syncing. I have far more files to store than there is capacity on my SSD, and yet, most of the cloud storage providers seem to offer only full or selective sync capabilities.<p>What I would <i>like</i> to have is the ability to browse my <i>entire</i> file repository and &quot;pin&quot; certain files to make sure I can have the most critical stuff offline, while other files would be streamed when I need them.<p>I kind of hoped that SpaceMonkey (now Vivint Smart Drive) would be the answer for me and have one sitting right here. It&#x27;s a a pretty cool device in theory, but in practice, it is extremely slow, backed by a company that could not care less about the product it has acquired.<p>Then there is Dropbox Smart Sync. This seems promising, but only is available for business users. I don&#x27;t have any experiences with it.<p>Still looking for one single product to this right. Am I the only one frustrated with this?

This is confusing in so many ways<p>1. They give no mention of how this handles existing installs of Google Drive or Google Photos Backup.<p>2. The application has the exact same name for Google Photos and Google Drive. Do I need to download and install both? I tried that, but couldn&#x27;t move the second to my applications directory without overwriting the first. Looking at the downloads they&#x27;re the same size, so I&#x27;m guessing they&#x27;re the same, but that begs the question, why the two download links in the blog?<p>3. Where will photos be saved? I save mine in Google Drive, and choose the option to sync to Google Photos. Will they be stored directly on Google Photos? Because I&#x27;d rather keep them on Drive.<p>I&#x27;m still a huge fan of both products, and hope that this cleans up a number of integration issues between both services, but this announcement feels like it wasn&#x27;t thought through at all.

This is so confusing. What&#x27;s that? A replacement, an addition? Will this clutter up my photos? It&#x27;s like an invitation to: Try it out to find out what it really does and if it clutters up your photo stream... deal with it.<p>Update: oh the blog actually writes it is an replacement. Great... now I don&#x27;t know if this works in any way with Insync in parallel :(

If only Google Drive&#x27;s app actually worked reliably (see the discussion from the day before yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14732023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14732023</a> -- &quot;It&#x27;s been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me&quot;) this might be worth trying out.<p>Since they can&#x27;t even reliably sync the Drive folders they <i>claim</i> they can, who would trust their &quot;backup&quot; of the <i>rest</i> of the system?

I really hope this update will sort out the lack of meta data regarding which photos the Photo app compressed during upload. Even with the &quot;Original&quot; option set, the Android app would silently(!) switch to the compressed form, then happily tell you to delete the originals to save space(!!). I now have a random mix of photos both on Drive, Photos and copied over USB to my HDD but haven&#x27;t found the time to unpick this schmozzle. I&#x27;m a paying customer.

&lt;sarcasm&gt;Maybe one day soon we&#x27;ll see an official Linux client.&lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;

I&#x27;ve already been doing this by pointing &quot;My Documents&quot; to ~&#x2F;Google Drive&#x2F;Documents, so I guess this just simplifies the process for everyone else.<p>(I mean, Drive already has versioning, so this adds... an explicit form of versioning?)<p>Oh, and where&#x27;s our Linux client?! Gnome&#x27;s Drive support is <i>awful</i>. It just locks up Nautilus half the time.

Still, no linux client.

Can someone explain what this adds over Google Drive? More importantly, is it taking anything away? The blog post sure didn&#x27;t provide that necessary info.

Because Google Photos does not have an Android TV app, I periodically do a full Google Takeout to pull all my images so that I may rsync newer ones over to my NAS so that they appear in Plex and my wife can then view them on the Google TV.<p>Can you stop reinventing things that already exist, and perhaps fix things that are real customer pain points.<p>Like not being able to view Photos on an Android TV, like not being able to use Google Drive or even this new Backup and Sync on Linux... or the big one, the fact that GSuite accounts are crippled and the majority of new products cannot be used by those with GSuite accounts or can only be used in a severely crippled way.

My current workflow for backing up photos on Linux is:<p>1. Copy photos from memory card to a NAS. 2. Upload the photos to Google drive using skicka.<p>I&#x27;ve got a script to simplify this, so in reality the workflow just consists of inserting the memory card and running the script. The photos then appear in Google Photos fairly quickly afterwards. I use this for both jpg and nef. I&#x27;ve been pretty impressed with how good Photos is at handling nef files.<p>Skicka: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;skicka" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;skicka</a>

I bought some extra space from Google for photos (which I have backed up in many places), my credit card didn&#x27;t work for some reason, and they immediately downgraded my account to the free tier, with no warning.<p>It might have been because there were actually no files taking up the extra space, but losing all my pictures because my CC didn&#x27;t work and they don&#x27;t have their $1.99 or being paranoid that that might happen is not worth it.

&gt;You probably keep your most important files and photos in different places—your computer, your phone, various SD cards, and that digital camera you use from time to time. It can be a challenge to keep all these things safe, backed up, and organized, so today we&#x27;re introducing Backup and Sync. It&#x27;s a simpler, speedier and more reliable way to protect the files and photos that mean the most to you. This new tool replaces the existing Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for Mac&#x2F;PC.<p>This actually describe the problem a lot of people have without providing a solution. Uploading, Syncing doesn&#x27;t fix this. How are we going to sort and manage all these files that are scattered in difference medium in the first place? Do we Copy all of them to our PC &#x2F; Mac? And then Manually sort through all these files, before uploading to Google Cloud?<p>What if my 256&#x2F; 512 GB SSD couldn&#x27;t fit all these files I have laying around? How am i support to sort through all these files over the last decade if i dont have them stored in the first place?

My biggest problem with Google Drive is its pricing. Why is your 1TB $100&#x2F;year, when pretty much every major competitor charges $60?<p>$100&#x2F;yr would buy me 5TB with Microsoft OneDrive.<p>Even Apple, which usually has crazy margins on everything, gives you 2TB for $10&#x2F;month.

For anyone running the macOS high Sierra beta, don&#x27;t install this yet. I installed it, but it refuses to sync anything on (1) an APFS drive or (2) a network share. The error dialog says it requires HFS+.

Why is Photos still not a public API?<p>I&#x27;m happy to pay for the storage but I need a Linux client. I&#x27;d write one myself with a song in my heart, but Google keeps obfuscating this stuff for no good reason.

I wonder, how reliable is mounting a regular server via a sshfs connection? I sometime do it to edit static websites and it works.

Does it still not count photos above a certain megapixel count towards the free space?

Let&#x27;s not kid ourselves. This is Google trying to fill up your account so you will purchase extra space sooner.

&gt; Backup and Sync is an app for Mac and PC that backs up files and photos safely in Google Drive and Google Photos, so they&#x27;re no longer trapped on your computer and other devices.<p>Yeah, they only become trapped on Google&#x27;s servers.

I dont get what&#x27;s new here or am i confused?<p>I have used many services over the years, OneDrive from Microsoft, Google Drive &#x2F; Photo sync thing, dropbox, Amazon storage, etc.<p>Honestly being that I work at Microsoft I am obviously going to have a bias a bit, but this stuff is not about my work its about my life and how to stay synced across my Windows Phone, Windows 10 devices (i have a few), my iPhone, my iPad, etc. and the best way i have found to do all of that is with OneDrive.<p>Hold on, i know what you&#x27;re thinking that im just picking my companies product, but honestly i tried them all, a lot over the years and OneDrive just does a great job, has first class apps for iOS, Android, Windows and powerful Web UI for when i just need to jump in and find something.<p>Also you get 5 gigs for free with OneDrive. Move up to 50GB and its $1.99&#x2F;mo.<p>On top of that I use an Office 365 subscription for my personal life (custom domain&#x2F;email) and again i get a ton more storage through that.<p>Really worth giving it a try!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onedrive.live.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;plans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onedrive.live.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;plans&#x2F;</a>