Re: Drive for desktop on Mac OS (Ventura) - Page 3

MagpiesMike · 02-07-2023 10:17 AM

Hello everyone,

I've been supporting a client as their users upgrade their Mac OS to the latest version, Ventura. Users were prompted some time after the upgrade to modify the Drive for desktop solution to align to the new Mac OS approach to managing cloud based storage solutions. After that change users experienced extremely poor performance when opening as well as saving documents located on Google Drive. We reviewed the documentation provided by Google on how to manage this change. See below:

Use File Provider with Drive for desktop

The section titled "Why am I being asked to enable Google Drive?" does not seem to be accurate based on our experience. The steps we followed were to

Open Finder, Select Google Drive and navigate to Get Info
Click the check box Shared Folder
Change the local user rights from Read Only to Read Write

These two changes appeared to have an immediate impact on performance. Our sense is that users were previously downloading/mirroring copies of all documents they were working on rather than streaming them. Also note that when dragging a document from Google Drive the desktop (and possibly other local drive locations), the document is moved from Drive to the Mac; removing the document from Drive. Holding the Option key while dragging the document makes a copy of the document locally.

QUESTIONS:

Is this the appropriate way to address the change? It would be challenging if it was a large population of users.
Is there any additional documentation on the change that we are missing?
Is there any detailed documentation on the function of Drive for desktop for users? We only found out about the copy v. move feature by chance.

Thanks to this communities support on this topic.

Stas

@Stassounds like you have a good handle on how the symlink works.

I wouldn't say that 😉.

My setup is not based on a symlink and I have not had a good experience with it either. It did work (under /Volumes). But after a reboot, the symlink was always removed. This is only good if you want to make the old paths temporarily functional (e.g., to open an old file with many shortcuts).

Why do you want to have your external drive under user/library?

Chrstian

That is where google drive puts the CloudStorage folder, I didnt put it there.

Stas

I am not entirely sure, but exactly this kind of manipulation is prevented by Drive Sync or Apple itself or whatever. Therefore, it is also not possible to change the storage location in the settings. If you could change the storage location (with or without a symlink) so easily, at least I wouldn't have ended up here 😊.

Why don't you try Mountain Duck? I can well imagine that you can do it with it.

Chrstian

i checked it out but didnt see how it can work, i will look it over again. thanks for your time here.

pbraunstein

Hello guys. Any update on this topic ? Is Mountain Duck the final solution to get it working as before ? Thanks

Tom_Sch

I am running macOS Sonoma since WWDC and after a few issues with Drive I have to say it runs as expected and even the new Apple system is okay.

Stas

Have I missed anything? What has changed since Sonoma?
If I'm right, the path structure is still the same, you still can't choose the location of the drive folder, so everything is still the same.
I've also moved away from the Mountain Duck solution after having problems synchronizing.

pbraunstein

I'm currently running Mountain Duck in trial mode for myself and a few other users. The interface is really good, but working live directly on Google Drive with multiple users doesn't seem to be as perfect as Google Drive was before the File Provider integration. It would be great if someone could find another solution.

Chrstian

i edit video from cloud storage (google drive or dropbox) every week and since google refuses to fix the google drive/mac file provider issue i have been using MD for over a year and it is not great in terms of syncing well and syncing quickly. i encountered a number of issues trying to get it to work just right. but it seems to be the only solution until google accommodates the mac OS file provider system. i spoke with mac support (ran it up the chain) and with google support and the ball is in googles court to accommodate the OS structure, not the other way around.

Stas

@Chrstian wrote:
the ball is in googles court to accommodate the OS structure

I guess people will fly to Mars before that happens.

Chrstian

this situation with the google drive and mac's is very messed up, we need to harass google support to correct their software to work with mac's os

software is designed to work with windows or apple operating systems not the other way around

Stas

I'm surprised that these issues are so rarely discussed online. Most people are probably fine with what they are given. Eat or die 😆.

icrew

By far the best way to get feedback directly to the Drive for Desktop product team is by way of the "Send feedback" option within Drive for Desktop, though harassing support is a good second step. Here's where you find it:

I do think that if everyone on this thread was to submit the feedback, they might notice.

Hope that helps,

Ian

Stas

My detailed feedback is out. I like to be surprised 😊.

pbraunstein

I just did as you mentioned:

I sent this messsage:

I won't be able to upgrade to the latest version of Google Drive. For my team, it's crucial to work directly from Google Drive, and using Apple File Provider without the ability to share a common directory among all users makes it impossible to link files without the need to relink them after each edit. If the directory structure could be modified to something like Users/[username]/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive/ without including the username, that could already be a solution to the problem. I'll continue using the current version, but if it gets banned, I will consider switching to 'Mountain Duck' or even look for another cloud solution to address this issue.

Chrstian

mountain duck has been very unstable, unsycing from the google drives and auto pausing the connection so i posted a comment to google again to fix the streaming folder selection location. heres a link if you want help get attention to the problem so we can get back to focusing on work

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/259797761?hl=en&sjid=5958143726115969673-NC

also, does anyone have another 3rd party app like mountain duck that works?..