
Introducing Backup and Sync for Google Photos and Google Drive - eknight15
https://www.blog.google/products/photos/introducing-backup-and-sync-google-photos-and-google-drive/
======
arondeparon
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.

What I would _like_ to have is the ability to browse my _entire_ file
repository and "pin" certain files to make sure I can have the most critical
stuff offline, while other files would be streamed when I need them.

I kind of hoped that SpaceMonkey (now Vivint Smart Drive) would be the answer
for me and have one sitting right here. It'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.

Then there is Dropbox Smart Sync. This seems promising, but only is available
for business users. I don't have any experiences with it.

Still looking for one single product to this right. Am I the only one
frustrated with this?

~~~
nyreed
I think Microsoft rolled this out as standard for OneDrive in a version of
Windows (8? 8.1?), only to revert the change due to customer confusion.

~~~
alexvy86
It's supposed to come back (improved) with the Fall Creators Update though. I
can see how many users would get confused by it but hopefully this time it'll
be more intuitive.

------
squillful
This is confusing in so many ways

1\. They give no mention of how this handles existing installs of Google Drive
or Google Photos Backup.

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't move
the second to my applications directory without overwriting the first. Looking
at the downloads they're the same size, so I'm guessing they're the same, but
that begs the question, why the two download links in the blog?

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'd rather keep them on Drive.

I'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't thought through at all.

~~~
dontblink
1\. If you have Google Drive for PC/Mac installed, it will update it to Backup
and Sync.

2\. The difference in the two endpoints are the defaults selected during the
setup wizard (which you can change from either). The Photos versions is geared
more towards Photos users and the Drive users more towards Drive.

3\. They are saved in Drive, and are synced to Photos. However if you delete
in either Drive or Photos cloud, it will affect the other. Whether it is
deleted from your hard drive depends on what you have selected in the deletion
settings portion.

~~~
wcdolphin
How does that work given that a google Photos has different pricing for
compressed photos?

~~~
rishsharma
It utilizes similar pricing for photos and videos.

You can elect to upload Photos/Videos in High Quality (which does not consume
quota).

------
therealmarv
This is so confusing. What's that? A replacement, an addition? Will this
clutter up my photos? It'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.

Update: oh the blog actually writes it is an replacement. Great... now I don't
know if this works in any way with Insync in parallel :(

~~~
dabernathy89
That happened to me the first time I checked the option to sync my Drive
photos to Google Photos a couple of years ago. I had random work and school
related graphics and photos jammed into my Photos library for a looooong time
(and there was no "undo").

------
gumby
If only Google Drive's app actually worked reliably (see the discussion from
the day before yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732023)
\-- "It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me") this might be worth
trying out.

Since they can't even reliably sync the Drive folders they _claim_ they can,
who would trust their "backup" of the _rest_ of the system?

~~~
dkonofalski
Just like the discussion in that post, that user is such a far out edge case
that it's just flat out disingenuous to say that the Google Drive app doesn't
work reliably. It's not perfect, but it works for 99.9% of the people using
it. 700,000 files at more than 2TB is not the typical use case for Google
Drive.

~~~
gumby
The backup case is of the same scale as the original poster's situation.

My team found it unreliable for much smaller directories as well. 6 people, 6
independently unhappy with it. It was only on a conference call when we
realized we were looking at different copies of files that we all complained
of the same symptoms. Anecdote rather than data, I admit, but it's disturbing
that each of us silently assumed we were the only ones having trouble.

(FWIW we stuck to google for realtime shared docs, but moved to DB for general
file storage, including spreadsheets and presentations)

------
verytrivial
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 "Original" 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't found the time to unpick this schmozzle. I'm a paying customer.

------
rufugee
<sarcasm>Maybe one day soon we'll see an official Linux client.</sarcasm>

~~~
simonh
Ok but which Linux? Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? etc... Which desktop should they
integrate with? Gnome? KDE?

I suppose they could go the Steam route and only support Ubuntu, but then that
would be Ubuntu support, not really Linux support. It would be nice to have at
least some support on Linux for sure, but unfortunately deciding to support
Linux isn't an answer to a question, it's opening a whole extra big bag full
of knotty questions.

Until that issue gets sorted out in Linux land, providing first class Linux
support in any professional, commercial grade application or service is going
to be problematic.

~~~
subsection1h
Insync is a Google Drive client that has been "providing first class Linux
support in any professional, commercial grade application" for years. Also,
what do desktop environments have to do with Google Drive clients?

------
Slackwise
I've already been doing this by pointing "My Documents" to ~/Google
Drive/Documents, so I guess this just simplifies the process for everyone
else.

(I mean, Drive already has versioning, so this adds... an explicit form of
versioning?)

Oh, and where's our Linux client?! Gnome's Drive support is _awful_. It just
locks up Nautilus half the time.

------
codesink
Still, no linux client.

~~~
rogerbinns
I am mystified as to why Google keeps ignoring Linux especially for Drive.
Don't a non-trivial number of Google employees run Linux? It also rules out
Drive for company wide deployment if any of the people are using Linux, since
they will be excluded.

That is one thing Dropbox at least gets right.

~~~
matt4077
Linux marketshare is around 1.5%, and I'd speculate those choosing Linux tend
to be less willing to trust google/the cloud with their data than average.

It's just not worth it when the best-case outcome is indistinguishable from a
rounding error,

~~~
rogerbinns
You are talking about individual deployments where plain market share is
reasonable. I'm talking about group deployments where multiple people need to
work together. In that case the solution has to work for everyone.

------
thetwentyone
Can someone explain what this adds over Google Drive? More importantly, is it
taking anything away? The blog post sure didn't provide that necessary info.

~~~
fredley
If it's backup, it should _not_ work the same way: deletions should not be
synced for example.

~~~
rishsharma
You can elect not to sync deletions in the new application.

------
buro9
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.

Can you stop reinventing things that already exist, and perhaps fix things
that are real customer pain points.

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.

~~~
Sargos
It's not going to be easy to just put Google Photos on Android TV. Android TV
has no concept of accounts or privacy so the only way it could really work
right now is to either open up the entire user's photos to anyone currently
using the TV or invent some sort of hard to use scheme such as only displaying
photos "tagged" a certain way as public/tv which most people probably won't
do. Or they could ask for a PIN each time which is annoying.

Solving that issue is going to take a re-work of the Android TV user
experience. A lot of apps have this problem such as Drive, Dropbox, Docs, etc.
There's no current way to have an app with personal data be usable on a public
device like a TV.

>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.

You have to remember that GSuite, as an app for businesses and education, has
a lot more restraints and big hairy legal and ethical issues for every single
feature than the consumer versions of the apps. Each thing Google makes needs
to be looked at from a very different angle and lots of decisions have to be
made for it to be made available for business use. The use cases are very
different. Money is handled differently. Lots of access controls need to be
created for admins in each app available in GSuite. It's not a trivial amount
of work.

~~~
euyyn
Can you cast photos from the Photos app in your phone?

~~~
Sargos
Yes. Which makes sense because you are actively sharing them and can end the
display whenever you want. No privacy issues.

~~~
euyyn
Sounds like the appropriate solution for OP's use case of the wife looking at
them on the TV.

------
vinkelhake
My current workflow for backing up photos on Linux is:

1\. Copy photos from memory card to a NAS. 2\. Upload the photos to Google
drive using skicka.

I'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've
been pretty impressed with how good Photos is at handling nef files.

Skicka: [https://github.com/google/skicka](https://github.com/google/skicka)

------
nkkollaw
I bought some extra space from Google for photos (which I have backed up in
many places), my credit card didn't work for some reason, and they immediately
downgraded my account to the free tier, with no warning.

It might have been because there were actually no files taking up the extra
space, but losing all my pictures because my CC didn't work and they don't
have their $1.99 or being paranoid that that might happen is not worth it.

~~~
moultano
The behavior in this case is that new uploads are blocked but your existing
files remain.

[https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en](https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2736362?hl=en)
"If you cancel your storage plan or when your storage plan expires, your
storage limits will reset to the free levels for each product at the end of
your billing cycle. Everything in Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail will
still be accessible, but you won't be able to create or add anything new over
the free storage limit. If you reach or exceed the free storage limit"

~~~
nkkollaw
Ah, that would make me a lot more confident.

Don't a lot of people archive terabytes of stuff and just leave after 1 month,
though?

~~~
mavendependency
Gmail would refuse to recieve mail until you either free up space or upgrade.
They share the same storage space.

------
ksec
>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're introducing Backup and Sync.
It'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/PC.

This actually describe the problem a lot of people have without providing a
solution. Uploading, Syncing doesn'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 / Mac? And then Manually sort through
all these files, before uploading to Google Cloud?

What if my 256/ 512 GB SSD couldn'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?

------
olegkikin
My biggest problem with Google Drive is its pricing. Why is your 1TB
$100/year, when pretty much every major competitor charges $60?

$100/yr would buy me 5TB with Microsoft OneDrive.

Even Apple, which usually has crazy margins on everything, gives you 2TB for
$10/month.

~~~
reustle
If that extra $40 a year causes them to not shut it down so fast, I'm all for
it :)

------
crgwbr
For anyone running the macOS high Sierra beta, don'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+.

------
oliwarner
Why is Photos still not a public API?

I'm happy to pay for the storage but I need a Linux client. I'd write one
myself with a song in my heart, but Google keeps obfuscating this stuff for no
good reason.

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

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

------
gvd
Let's not kid ourselves. This is Google trying to fill up your account so you
will purchase extra space sooner.

~~~
matt4077
Are you insinuating their storage offers are offers for storage? That sounds
like quite the conspiracy.

------
4ad
> 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're no longer trapped on
> your computer and other devices.

Yeah, they only become trapped on Google's servers.

------
LyalinDotCom
I dont get what's new here or am i confused?

I have used many services over the years, OneDrive from Microsoft, Google
Drive / Photo sync thing, dropbox, Amazon storage, etc.

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.

Hold on, i know what you'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.

Also you get 5 gigs for free with OneDrive. Move up to 50GB and its $1.99/mo.

On top of that I use an Office 365 subscription for my personal life (custom
domain/email) and again i get a ton more storage through that.

Really worth giving it a try!

[https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-
us/plans/](https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/plans/)

~~~
Veratyr
I won't trust OneDrive after they cancelled their unlimited plans. Yes, I
understand it's unrealistic for such a thing to exist but Microsoft offered it
anyway, then took it away when people actually used it.

Plus having it forced on me through Windows makes me instantly hate it.

