When Google’s GDrive was finally made available to the public, I was thrilled to see that the pricing structure would allow me to get double the space for the same amount of money I was paying Dropbox. Reading the description, it seemed that GDrive had all of the features that I liked from Dropbox and even offered an equivalent to Dropbox’s add on packrat service.
In short, it seemed like a great deal. So I did a trial run. I moved (copied would be the more accurate term) some of my personal repos from my Dropbox folder to my shiny new Google Drive. The initial sync took a long time (a little over a day) but that is to be expected with any of those types of services.
My initial impressions were mostly positive. However, I did notice that GDrive’s Mac OS X app uses four times as much RAM as Dropbox’s. Still, things were going pretty well and RAM is cheap, so for the money I was saving on storage it was worth the extra memory.
My main use for Dropbox is hosting Git and Mercurial repos along with one or two SVN ones that I haven’t had time to switch over to Git. Things worked just like they did with Dropbox. Until my secondary machine synced with the GDrive. on that machine a git status showed that all the files had been removed from the repo. I readded them and things were fine until I moved back to the main machine where I saw the same issue.
I have done Googling and can’t seem to find a reason for this. The only discussion I have found of people using the GDrive in this manner seems to have ended with another user warning the Google groups asker that there could be potential issues.
Sorry to say that I don’t have a fix, but I am migrated back to Dropbox. It does seem that you get what you pay for. That might seem harsh to some of you, but if you do software development for a living that is the kind of issue that should not be tolerated at all. Let me know if you have had the same experience or not on Twitter or Google+.
