
It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me - wabi-sabi
https://dynalist.io/d/wRIiJ0s0ONiB1w98ginB4g_n
======
Steeeve
That's comical. I feel like I have an understanding of what's going on because
I've been in this scenario on a contract - not with Google.

I was told - "there's a backlog of support requests. They are old requests
that nobody has been working on and our offshore team can't handle. Being an
expert in this particular product (and always in need of some extra cash), I
said "OK, but let me be very clear that this is secondary to all other work
that I'm doing."

Then they proceeded to hand over tickets. I wasn't allowed to communicate
directly to customers, and communicating with their offshore staff was a
challenge. "I need a log to even begin to troubleshoot this." followed by a
frustrated customer reporting "I don't know why you're asking for this log, it
won't help." OK, I have to be more clear with support, who I assumed would
know. "I need this log. You create it by taking these steps." Another follow
up from the customer with the same log again, reporting more frustration.
Repeat this process 5 or 6 times, on 20 different tickets. I finally follow up
along a different path. "Well, you see they see a request for logs and they
only have one template to ask for logs. I'll get it straightened out." A month
goes by. I'm getting requests for updates. I follow up on every path I have
available. One customer was smart enough to get me the right logs, but they
did not forward that log on. After much back and forth I ended up getting that
one log. It pointed to a source code problem that I had no access to view, let
alone edit. And of course, I have no contact to send this to.

What I ended up doing is submitting a bug report, the proper logs, and a
summary of the logic problem in the source through one of my clients support
account. Then I updated the tickets that looked to be related with "pending
outcome of support ticket 1234. Months later, that particular problem was
patched.

Hopefully the customers with their tickets stuck in "level 3 support" were
eventually notified. I backed out of that project at some point because it
just wasn't a good use of my time.

I understand the need to find a way to scale support. But if you are going to
scale, monitor for effectiveness, plan for procedural changes, and do
something to make sure the communications channels are working.

~~~
mgkimsal
"scaling support" almost always seems hand in hand with "dumbing down for
lowest common denominator". By the time things have made it through "please
restart your computer"-level stuff, maybe the only way to scale is to put real
engineers on problems and "allow" them to actually talk to the people having
the problems. This approach seems to be the only one companies seem hell-bent
on never trying.

~~~
flukus
Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even
more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more
expensive.

That said, I do think software devs should be more involved with the customer
for other reasons, far to often they are building software without having any
idea what the customers workflow is.

~~~
shermozle
The same reason forcing devs to do ops on their own product justifies having
devs do (some of) their own customer support. Otherwise they just toss any old
crap over the fence and it becomes somebody elses' problem. Force them to
solve those problems and they magically go away, cos devs hate support.

~~~
wastedhours
If possible, teams should always "fix it twice" from support requests - get
the customer sorted ASAP, and then determine if it's possible to solve the
problem fully (either extra support documentation, patch, longer term feature
etc...).

------
scarmig
Wow, that's enraging and really bad, even for a company as... unique in its
approach to customer support as Google.

I really hope someone on Drive is reading this and can escalate, but it's
really bad that it takes a highly voted post on Hacker News to get some kind
of resolution. Even "it's too expensive to fix this, here are your files and a
refund from when it started breaking" would be infinitely better than this.

~~~
nikanj
The modern, scaled-up, cost-effective way of doing support seems to be:

1) Tell them to restart their PC.

2) Tell them to restart their PC again.

3) Hope they go away, as the amount of revenue they bring simply isn't worth
the engineering hours. In your behemoth organization, having an engineer look
at a ticket costs around $18000 in internal billing.

4) Wait. Tell them to reinstall the software, and restart their PC.

5) Offer to refund their money. Hope they take the hint, and go away.

6) Wait.

7) Close the ticket with a vague excuse, such as "Missing contact details", or
"We've released a new .version since this was opened."

If, and only if, the customer manages to write a blog post funny enough to
reach the front page of Reddit/HN/Whatnot, the ticket will be seen by someone
in the development organization, not the support organization.

After this, things start to happen. Possibly even someone from VP-level
promises to fix bad communication between the support organization, and the
development one. They proceed to fix this bad communication by terminating
communication completely.

------
Nition
Ridiculous that they imply throughout that they have a (mysteriously silent)
Level 3 support or engineering team working on the issue for almost that
entire time.

Would be amazing if that's actually true and it turns out they discovered some
huge underlying issue with the system from the user logs that they've actually
had a team working on... but I'm sure it isn't. For a start if an issue like
that was being worked on surely they could contact you to let you know.

~~~
victorhooi
I am on that team =).

I won't say much publicly, but if this is the issue I think it is (customer
has a huge number of files, and is trying to sync it with a 32-bit client, and
hitting memory issues), we are aware of the issue, and are definitely working
on it.

It's a tricky thing to solve in any sync client - for example, Dropbox has a
cap around 300,000 files (I believe this customer had 700,000 files?):

> [https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-
> limit](https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit)

Note: The performance of the Dropbox application may start to decline when you
store above 300,000 files.

Other clients may have similar limits. I'll see if I can find our docs on it.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

~~~
dpkonofa
This is my annoyance with the OP - they're a very clear edge case and,
technically, the product still works for them. They're not paying for a
Windows or Mac app, they're paying for online storage and that part of the
service works fine. They can still access all their files via the web browser
and they can add and download files as they see fit. The issue with the app is
probably exactly what you're mentioning and the person is acting like the
service they're paying for is broken. It's not broken, they're just using the
service in a very non-standard way.

Edit: Since people seem to be voting my comments down, I'll offer an analogy.
This is like a professional bowler going to a family bowling alley and
complaining about the balls they provide for you to use. These same balls work
for 99% of the people paying to bowl. You don't deserve a refund because
you're an edge case from all their other customers since the actual bowling
alley is still open and you can still bowl, it just might not be a great
experience. Get another ball, bring your own ball, or stop coming to this
bowling alley.

~~~
paulmd
No, Google Drive is sold as a customer-facing service and customers have a
basic expectation that it will do what it says on the box. If the Dropbox
application didn't run, I'd be pissed too, even if it does happen to be
"online storage".

If someone was complaining that an Amazon S3 application was broken, that
would be a different story.

~~~
dpkonofa
It _does_ do what it says on the box. You're not required to download any of
the apps in order to use Google Drive. My contention is that the OP claims
that they deserve some kind of reimbursement because "they're paying for it"
but the "it" here is not the app, it's the service. They're paying for online
storage. There are several ways to sync your files to that service. The Google
Drive app is a free option. He's paying for the service, not the app.

Note that even _you_ said "service" in your description of what it is.

~~~
chrischen
Drive is terrible then if what it says on tje box can’t deliver working sync
clients. Dropbox delivers working sync clients out of the box, even though you
could just use their web interface.

~~~
dpkonofa
First off, I'm not sure why everyone is using the phrase "what is says on the
box". There is no box for this service. Services don't come in boxes and the
website doesn't say anything about paying for an app. You're paying for the
service and the service continues to work. If you don't like the app and that
makes using the service so much of a challenge, use another app with Google
Drive or switch to Dropbox. The OP clearly _has_ to use Google Drive because
Google is the only service that offers unlimited storage space and they just
want to be the squeaky wheel by falsely equating the app with the service that
they're actually paying for.

~~~
Pyxl101
You're making an extremely nitpicky and useless distinction. If a service
provider offers native clients for a set of supported platforms, for use with
their storage service, a natural and reasonable expectation is that _they will
work_.

If a video game publisher sells a game for Mac and Windows, and one of those
platforms doesn't work, then the affected customer is entitled either to
customer support or a refund. The advertised product (native client on a
certain platform) isn't working as advertised.

~~~
dpkonofa
Of course they should work. You're making a false equivalence, though. A video
game is a product that you've paid for. The user in this case is not paying
for the app, they're paying for the service. Just because Google offers the
app to use with their storage service doesn't mean that their support should
refund money to the user when the service itself is functioning exactly as
advertised and intended. My contention is 100% with the OP's insistence that
they deserve a refund because they're "paying for it". They're not paying for
the app and the service is working so why is a refund in order?

~~~
Rantenki
The customer made a decision to use a particular storage platform due to the
features that are advertised. One of those features is a desktop client.

If the desktop client is failing, then he's not getting what is promised "on
the box" (or in the feature set advertised on google.com).

They sell that client pretty hard btw:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/2490101?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2490101?hl=en)

 _To use the full power of Google Drive, you should install Google Drive for
Mac /PC, a desktop sync client. This synchronizes any or all your files to
Google Drive on the web, making them available anywhere, at any time, on any
device. It also provides secure, cloud-based storage for your files._

~~~
victorhooi
That's a mis-framing of the situation.

The issue isn't so much as the client is failing - but that it wasn't designed
to handle their edge-case - and trying to sync 700,000+ items, or 700GB worth
of files to your desktop is definitely at the edges.

Other desktop sync clients (e.g. Box.net or Dropbox) exhibit similar
performance characteristics - e.g. Dropbox advertise a limit of around 300,000
files ([https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-
limit](https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit)). So this isn't
something specific to us.

For us, I know there isn't a hard limit per se, but there are memory
limitations, due to this being a 32-bit binary. So things like the user's
environment, and the length of certain fields could also play a factor.

However, it is something that I know several smart people are chipping away at
steadily - in fact, there's a new "Backup and Sync client" we announced a
month or so ago, which is launching any day now. It's basically Drive Sync
Client 2.0.

~~~
njpg
seems like if there's a limit to the number of files the client can handle,
the client should warn you as you're approaching that limit, and ideally block
you from adding too many.

If the client allows you do do something, and you do it, and it causes the
client to break, that is 100% a "failure"

------
Lazare
Google periodically flirts with the idea of being a consumer products company
that provides products to consumers and then supports them.

There is extensive evidence (of which this is just the latest element) that
this is not a good idea, and won't be until there's a fundamental change.

~~~
ericd
I've found Google Fi to have exceptionally good support, and the same is true
with Nexus phones - a very painless RMA process when something didn't work
quite right.

~~~
gcb0
I call that the Google myopia.

the new users of a new, sexy product, usually free, are always in awe because
they really go the extra mile and have the best team working on it. that's
when everyone else is looking from far away and they see that everything is
perfect.

then the team gets promoted, leaves, etc. and what's left is the real Google
consumer product. and that is the crap they everyone sees up close. and every
problem goes to support forum hell.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, that might be the case with fi, and it is sort of the natural way of
things. I don't remember any older Google products having ever had a good
support system, though.

------
js3dev
I synched about 50GB to google drive and discovered that it started silently
eliminating some of my files. The eliminated files weren't found on google
dive's bin, but were in my local mac's trash without any matadata or folder
info so I couldn't put them back into their original folders. Good thing I had
a backup of all these files. Their synch algorithm seems messed up, it also
fails to synch every 2 hours on mac. I've since switched to dropbox, it is
worth the extra cost.

~~~
phillipsdesign
The same thing happened to me. Google Drive began silently deleting any
duplicate files it found in any of my directories, leaving just one original.
A lot of my projects use the same web framework, hence my projects were all
broken. Restoring them via their UI wasn't possible either. I stopped using
Drive after that.

------
toomuchtodo
This is why Dropbox has value. It works, its reliable, and if you're a paying
customer you can get support.

Spend the $10/month. Don't go on for more than half a year with your storage
being broken.

Disclaimer: no affiliation except a satisfied pro account user

EDIT: Edge cases notwithstanding.

~~~
victorhooi
I'm not sure what value that would add here...

The customer's issue seems to be that they have a very large number of files,
and are trying to sync it with a 32-bit desktop client, and are hitting memory
issues.

Dropbox themselves state this on their websites:

[https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-
limit](https://www.dropbox.com/help/space/file-storage-limit)

> Note: The performance of the Dropbox application may start to decline when
> you store above 300,000 files.

I've done some comparisons across various companies sync clients, and it is a
tricky problem.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google).

~~~
prirun
1\. Read list of files present on remote & write to file A

2\. Read list of files present locally and write to file B

3\. Sort files A & B

4\. Read files A & B to update remote and local files

This can be done with less than a meg a memory.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
You are forgetting about monitoring for changed files to resync those quickly.

~~~
Dylan16807
Get notification of file change, binary search the list of files, make
adjustments. This can also be done on a small amount of memory, independent of
file count.

I'm sure it's tricky to update the existing software, but as a generic problem
syncing files with O(1) or O(logn) memory is not very hard.

~~~
pjc50
Where's your sync client then?

(I've been very slowly designing my own, and the first thing for me was coming
up with a list of awkward cases ..)

~~~
Dylan16807
> Where's your sync client then?

I guess I was unclear here. It's hard to make a polished user application. The
not-hard part is just the core algorithm selection. I have enough minutes in
the day to consider algorithms, but not enough tens of hours to write suites
of quality software products.

------
laurentoget
Two things i do not get:

\- Why can't Google figure out what the conditions which trigger this issue
are and add a caveat to the documentation? "Bad things will happen if you use
more than 500,000 files on a 32 bit client." This would save both their
support organization and their customers a lot of pain.

\- Why does this particular user not give up on Google Drive if it does not
work for him, or at least try to figure out what is making it choke and avoid
that edge case? It is not like it is the only cloud storage solution out there
and finding a new one cannot be more painful than this endless BDSM dance with
support.

~~~
bad_user
> _Why can 't Google figure out what the conditions which trigger this issue
> are and add a caveat to the documentation?_

You can't fix software breakage by adding mentions in random documentation
pages.

Bad things shouldn't happen if you have more than 500,000 files. And if such
things are unavoidable due to limits that are out of Google's control, like
from the operating system or the CPU architecture, then the software should
warn the user well in advance before any damage occurs.

Google has all the manpower it needs. But this is again one of those instances
where they show how little they care. Which should have been obvious by now,
given that with all of their manpower and virtually unlimited resources, they
still haven't released a Linux client.

This is why I'm staying on Dropbox btw. My data is too important for me to
entrust a company that will sell cloud storage as a complementary to something
else.

~~~
appachai
> Bad things shouldn't happen if you have more than 500,000 files.

No one in the world has a solution which works for this case. I think the best
thing for Google to do here is to document it like dropbox and get out of the
blame game.

------
sergiotapia
Upvoting so someone at Google can look at this.

I won't use a Google product if I can avoid it because their support is
terrible and automated. At their scale I imagine any customer slight can be
rounded off because of the sheer number of customers they have.

~~~
stephengillie
I use Google Fi for my phone service, because I can switch my single device
and number to another carrier relatively quickly. I recommend my family and
friends not use Google Fi, because of Google's reputation for randomly killing
off services.

I don't want to have to navigate numerous family and friends to another
carrier on short notice, because an executive decided this side-project wasn't
quite profitable enough - or because an executive needs this side-project's
resources for their own pet project. I don't want my phone carrier shut off
because of another company's internal politics, and one way to avoid that is
to only utilize services which are a company's primary product.

~~~
yebyen
I was actually waiting for someone to bring up Project Fi, because in my
opinion it seems to be one of the Google services that breaks the mold, in
fact I've had more than a handful of interactions with their Customer Service
and I've always left satisfied or with my problem actually solved.

I really do hope they don't kill it, because I have recommended it to a number
of people who have gone ahead and signed up for the service, and they're
probably going to remember who recommended it after it goes away...

But at the same time it seems like it should have the be quite profitable, and
I have more faith that it won't go away. There's only one service at Google
that gets my cash dollars for $80-100/mo, and that's my Fi family plan with
three lines.

------
rbritton
I won't use any Google product for anything serious because of the complete
and utter lack of support. It is virtually impossible to get a human to look
at something, even when the process outlined is human-based rather than
automated.

1\. About 4 years ago, I tried to move a business on Google Maps. It took 10
months and contacting AdWords support to get it done.

2\. This year I've been trying to get an API quota increase for my employer.
At 3+ months the request has still gone unanswered. Thankfully we don't depend
on that for any revenue-generating function.

~~~
unityByFreedom
Looked like there was a lot of support given in this case. Just no solution
yet. I wouldn't infer lack of support from this, particularly since the user
can still access Drive from the browser.

------
songzme
Thanks for sharing the story.

Looking back, I realize that I had noticed bugs filed months prior. I don't
even know what they are about because I subconsciously avoid them. (perhaps
out of fear?) Assuming that these are valid tickets (and not outdated), I
subconsciously avoided tickets that are months old. Probably because:

1\. Bugs that are months old are probably super complicated and will take up a
good chunk of time to solve. 2\. Since the bug is so old, its not on anybody's
priority list. Picking it up just translates to me sacrificing time from my
family and hobbies. 3\. Even if I go out of my way to sacrifice my time to fix
a bug for a customer, there is rarely any gratitude (especially since the
issue is months old). Typically, a follow up response would be (rightfully)
along these lines: "It took you guys 6 months to fix my problem. Can I get
refunded for the past 6 months?"

Knowing how much stress and pain this bug (probably very unique) has caused
the author, I will make it a point to always understand old tickets and
prioritize it with management to make sure they get resolved promptly.

Is it okay for an engineer to take responsibility for a client and reach out
to them directly instead of through an middle man support? Say I was an
engineer working on google drive, could anything go wrong if I tweeted author
and told him I would personally look into his issue and work with him on it?

~~~
scarmig
Depends on company culture. I would expect that a Googler would get into some
trouble (at the very least step on some toes, though that might be warranted
in this situation) if they basically cut out the team this particular bug was
triaged to. Probably better to escalate internally and have the engineers
actually responsible for fixing the bug have it made a higher priority.

~~~
Nition
And yet for the customer, it's so much better if the engineer contacts you and
tells you they're actually working on your problem. This is why people love
dealing with small businesses who don't have those layers of bureaucracy.
"Wow, I'm actually talking to someone in a real conversation like a normal
human being."

~~~
scarmig
That is part of the trade off between going big and enterprisey versus small
and human. I think sometimes it makes sense to go one way, other times it
makes sense to go the other.

------
therealmarv
Personal advice: Spend one time 30$ on insync
[https://www.insynchq.com/](https://www.insynchq.com/) The Google Drive Sync
application (which is internally python on Mac and Windows I heard) is
horrible and a memory and cpu hog. Insync solved all my problems and with that
software I could replace Dropbox.

BTW: Filipino guys engineered that. I'm proud that I have one piece of
Filipino software running here :D

~~~
makethetick
+1 for Insync, it just works, also allows multiple accounts and works on
Linux, something I'm surprised still isn't offered officially by Google.

~~~
therealmarv
Yes, they should have bought Insync for a good amount of money give Insync for
free to everybody. It just works as you said. I also had sync problems with
certain file names on the official sync client. Insync just keeps working and
I use it for 2 Google Accounts currently (one personal, one gsuite).

------
CatDevURandom
What are the odds this suddenly actually gets attention when it hits the front
page?

Do you really have to publicly shame a company into action?

~~~
sand500
Yes and this isn't limited to software companies. Twitter probably your best
option to get actual support these days.

~~~
icelancer
Pretty much. I wield my blue checkmark like a CS hammer on Twitter. Works
well.

------
Zekio
The fact they haven't refunded him yet is quite disturbing

~~~
dpkonofa
Why? The service is working as intended. He is able to store things on Google
Drive. The issue is with the apps and the fact that he's trying to sync over
700GB via a 32-bit app. Additionally, they're offering him free storage. I
understand that it's not ideal, but it's not like the service is down and he's
unable to use it at all.

~~~
Dylan16807
> The issue is with the apps and the fact that he's trying to sync over 700GB
> via a 32-bit app.

You make it sound like some kind of fundamental truth of computing that it
would break.

The sync process is ~1 file at a time. It doesn't need to keep the entire
database in (virtual) memory.

~~~
dpkonofa
No I'm not. I'm merely pointing out why the app doesn't work. I don't expect
the person using it to know that. I'm just arguing that the service itself
works perfectly fine so his outrage about being a paying customer is misplaced
and misguided. There are several solutions out there to sync with Google
Drive. He's paying for the service, not for the syncing app. That is a free
product that is available to anyone.

------
lvh
The official Google Drive client has had all sorts of weirdness and missing
features. a) 1 account :/ b) Oh, your wifi is off because you just went on a
plane? Allow me to _busy loop and drain your entire battery_.

I have reasons for not liking Dropbox much, but their client is a lot more
reliable.

------
r1ch
Seems like the root cause here is the drive sync app is 32 bit and thus
running into the 2GB memory limit. I wonder if it's built with
LARGEADDRESSAWARE? Otherwise you could hex edit that into the PE header and
get double the usable address space as a possible workaround.

~~~
saurik
For anyone else who didn't manage to skim the right parts of that massive
communication log, here is a link to the bug in question.

[https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTomo298Ko1vU...](https://support.google.com/drive/forum/AAAAOxCWsTomo298Ko1vUY/?hl=en)

> Google Drive Error D41D "Unspecified Error" when trying to upload/sync large
> amount of files (700GB/1.2 Million files)

------
kelvin0
Google has the WORSE support I've ever experienced as a (former) PAYING
corporate customer of theirs. I completely distrust ANYTHING they tell me and
would NEVER again be caught paying for anything coming from them. Never again.

~~~
sixothree
I can't imagine myself paying for any google services. Besides. They already
have my secrets, I'm keeping the money.

~~~
askvictor
If you pay for them (i.e. g suite) then you can opt out of the data
collection. You either pay with money or with your data; not both (unless you
choose to).

------
b123400
I am having issue with my google drive as well, they calculated the wrong
storage usage and I simply cannot upload more files. I spent weeks to convince
the support it is their bug that clearing cache is not solving the problem.
They said they're going to follow up but nothing happened. I then just
cancelled the plan, now gmail is complaining not enough space and will stop
receiving email. I told the support my situation, and they gave me extra
storage for a month while they're dealing with the problem. Though the problem
is never resolved, and I now have to send an email to extend that extra
storage every month.

Seems like a proper way to get support from big companies in 2017 is to post
on hackernews.

~~~
victorhooi
Are you able to provide more details here?

Or you can reach out to me (details in profile).

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but comments here are my own).

~~~
pgl
> _details in profile_

I don't know if you've removed them since posting this, but your contact
details aren't actually in your profile.

~~~
victorhooi
Weird - OK, that should be fixed now =). Let me know if not.

~~~
pgl
Yup, fixed now.

------
MichaelBurge
> The Windows version of the product currently has difficulty syncing large
> numbers of files at once due to the memory constraints on 32-bit
> applications, even if your machine has a lot of memory.

It sounds like they have two issues:

* Access to the existing files

* The money given to Google so far

The first you can probably resolve by using the Linux client to download the
files to an external hard drive. (edit) And by "Linux client", I probably mean
either "nasty perl script that scrapes the web interface" or "some guy
charging $5 for a third-party client" or "a Mac that you borrow from a
friend".

The second you can resolve 6 months back by issuing chargebacks. It may be
polite to request a refund first, after downloading the files.

~~~
hwayne
Looks like the Mac client is failing, too:

> > Now GDrive is crashing consistently on my Mac.

> The second you can resolve 6 months back by issuing chargebacks. It may be
> polite to request a refund first, after downloading the files.

Seconding this; I've successfully gotten chargebacks in much less extreme
cases.

------
rosstex
This doubles as a nice advertisement for dynalist. It looks like Workflowy but
more functional.

~~~
Stratoscope
Funny coincidence seeing this here: I just renewed my annual Dynalist Pro
subscription today. I didn't realize it's already been a year since I switched
from Workflowy!

For anyone who likes Workflowy but is looking for something with more ongoing
development, Dynalist is a very nice alternative. And of course you can check
out both products for free and see what you prefer.

Update: This seems like a Dynalist day for me. I just got an email from them
that their "early bird" pricing for the Pro plan expires on July 15th and the
price will go up. So this is a good time to check it out.

(Usual disclosure: no connection with the company other being a happy
customer.)

------
Lxr
Can anyone with experience explain why companies continue to spend money on
"level 1 support"? It seems to universally make the support process worse - so
why do it? Is anyone honestly helped by scripted responses that would
literally be more effective if handled by bots?

~~~
tallanvor
"Bots", although not necessarily the type that people think of today have been
handling a lot of work for years. --Generally by providing a link to a
possible solution.

L1 support gets anything not handled by bots, and are generally able to close
around 80-90% of the cases. That's why you spend money on L1 support first.

L2 handles another 10-15% of the cases, and then depending on the company,
L3/L4/developers handle the rest.

Google either has an environment where L3 support doesn't talk to customers
(which would be pretty unusual), or they have a huge backlog and just don't
have resources to keep up with the cases reaching them. If the latter is the
issue, there's not a quick fix - even if you have funding to higher more of
them (and they usually earn quite a bit more than L1/L2 support), you have to
find people with the necessary skills, or be constantly trying to get people
ready to move up (L1 -> L2 -> L3, etc.), which can be difficult if you're
dealing with outsourcing on one or more levels, and if the tiers are located
in different locations.

The other thing is that if you're one person who has reported the issue and
you have an individual subscription, the truth is that it might not make sense
for the company to spend as much time that is require to fix your issue - If
you're spending $100/year, why should the company spend $10,000 to fix the
issue? It sucks, of course, but that's a simple truth about software support.

------
DelTaco
Welp at least with this tracking on HN you'll get someone at Google to
actually care about this problem.

------
intopieces
There is nothing more enraging to me than customer support giving you a reason
why they took so long to respond. I do not care that you were on vacation. We
are not friends. Pass your work to someone else when you leave.

------
pranaysharma
I had the same issue on my Mac. I solved it by changing the setting of Google
Drive from "do a complete sync" to "only sync a few folders". I gradually
increased the folders 1-2gb at a time and now the complete drive is synced.
Maybe give this a try. Rest i too am a paid user :( and the support you got is
a bit dissapointing

------
askvictor
My guess is that engineering resources have been focused on the upcoming new
version of drive, and are ignoring difficult bugs with the current version.

I could understand that in a smaller company, but seems poor at Google scale.
OTOH, that scale also means they don't care about losing a few customers over
something like this.

~~~
scarmig
The issue is, Google is trying to make serious inroads into enterprise with
Cloud/GSuite. This almost certainly costs Google more in reputation among that
crowd than it would to fix it or just offer a refund.

------
swiley
Drive is more or less a worthless toy in my opinion (along with Microsoft's
thing that competes with it.) There isn't even a Linux client.

Go download synchthing and be done with it.

~~~
sk0g
Insync is a better Drive client than what Google has on Windows, and is cross-
platform too.

------
E6300
It's so annoying that I can't use the arrow keys to scroll. Only Page Up/Down
or the mouse.

~~~
Nition
Ctrl-F has also been overridden with a custom implementation that hides most
of the text.

------
tehwebguy
More proof that paying Google for any services is a dangerous gamble.

------
philovivero
Hopefully this comment will be of use to someone.

My stack is Syncthing and Backblaze. It works very well for many terabytes of
data. No huge issues yet, although sometimes Syncthing gets into a weird state
about what's been synchronised for a while. Generally a restart of the daemon
will fix it.

Backblaze used of course in case all my devices storing synch'd files all fail
before I get replacements in place.

------
Aron
It's been six months, eight days, twelve hours Since you went away I miss you
so much and I don't know what to say I should be over you I should know better
but it's just not the case It's been six months, eight days, twelve hours
Since you went away

~~~
Nition
Normally I'd disapprove of a dumb song lyric joke on Hacker News but I'm
impressed that the timeframe from the song fits perfectly.

~~~
Aron
a little tooooo ironic. ok, ok..

------
gumby
We tried to standardize on Google Drive, but found that the Mac client
frequently (several times per day) would decide that it couldn't connect. Also
it would report that it had synched when in fact it hadn't.

Amazon silently failed to upload some files.

We went back to Dropbox.

------
mslate
Sounds like an ideal BDSM relationship you have there--maybe try groveling a
little more.

------
Jedd
There are lots of reasons for us to embrace and advocate the use of ISO8601.
Historical records of activity, like this article, demonstrate the obvious one
-- it doesn't confuse readers who live in any of the other 195 countries.

------
rasengan0
CS can be like talking to a wall, the consumer works for the vendor. Squeaking
wheel escalates to higher tiers. But sometimes outliers like local sync
clients really cannot/will not be fixed -- not enough community out cry ot
telemetry. Sounds like my experience with the old sync client for OneDrive for
Business on 32bit Windows 7 box - won't sync, stalls at 82K files. Surprised
support did not pass the buck to Microsoft. 6 months on, the solution is to
upgrade to Win 10 and start over. Perhaps a solution is try on another
platform say a friend's chromebook and rebuild the file structure with manual
tedium.

------
wabi-sabi
FYI, I've updated the log since this post. Google has refunded me since
December and is offering free 1TB for two years. They told me to use Backup
and Sync, releasing today, which should solve these problems. I appreciate the
refund+free years and have my fingers crossed with the update. I hope they
also internalize how broken their support process is, but I'm doubtful.

If B+S doesn't work I'll likely figure out how to sync everything (it's going
to be painful, but there are a lot of options in the comment, thanks) and move
to a different product.

------
l0b0
I've had a problem with Google Drive for a few months now, where they are
unable to change the currency I'm paying. Since foreign currency fees are
pretty steep and Google Support says they're on it, I've had a friendly
reminder that I soon won't be able to use Gmail anymore, and I received some
irrelevant BS when asking for a clarification.

------
tambourine_man
My advice: use rclone. The desktop app is terrible.

------
shaunol
From an outsider/user perspective I feel like Google's internal philosophy is
more algned with "keeping the algorithm happy" rather than deal with any
single customer on an individual basis.

------
duncan_bayne
Another vote for SyncThing here (
[https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net) ). I've used it on Android,
Linux and FreeBSD with great success.

~~~
voltagex_
SyncThing needs a lot of UI work. Compare to Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent
Sync).

~~~
duncan_bayne
Curious as to what you think it needs? I've found it perfectly adequate for my
purposes, and fairly intuitive to set up.

~~~
voltagex_
It's been a few months since I tried it, but I managed to get it into a state
where it couldn't find a peer on my LAN via autodiscovery.

The Android client can't back up many folders on Android 5+ where Resilio can
- I get write/permission errors despite having granted the app Storage
permissions.

The Android client is a thin wrapper around the web UI, but doesn't expose all
of the options / status messages.

I should do a side by side comparison.

~~~
ReverseCold
Mine has permanent errors for a bunch of folders and keeps disconnecting from
a local peer on LAN. I gave up on it within a week.

Still looking for something I can use like AirDrop but Mac<->Windows

------
hnaparst
Wow. I had a good opinion about Google's technical ability until I read this
story. That is just incredible.

I have tried a lot of services, and in the end, Dropbox is just bulletproof on
Linux and Windows.

------
deepsun
Try [https://mega.nz](https://mega.nz) \-- it end-to-end encrypted, and has a
very well-engineered client for all platforms + web.

~~~
sixothree
Since we're doing shout outs, I have to recommend Sync.com

------
siproprio
Google Drive is a mess. It frequently fails to process data and to propagate
changes across. Whenever I tried to use it I got burned.

------
unityByFreedom
Title is misleading. Their Google Drive application is broken- not web based
Drive. So, while they may not be getting the service they paid for, it is
somewhat functional; not fully disabled as the title implies.

------
foobaw
Try messaging Alex Vogenthaler privately! He's the director of PM for Google
Drive and should be able to help you.

------
Animats
Dropbox?

------
daxorid
edit: disregard.

~~~
joatmon-snoo
No, the issue is that the customer cannot use the local Google Drive client.
It's right there in the opening: "Google Drive started crashing regularly on
PC".

Gmail's default behavior, as anyone who's used it is familiar with, is to
automatically upload attachments in excess of a specific filesize to the
user's Google Drive account. The user has no control over this.

------
Jerry2
Why is this story being censored? Because it puts Google in negative light? We
don't see much censorship when other companies are put into spotlight over
horrendous customer service.

~~~
icebraining
How is this story being censored?

~~~
Jerry2
It was penalized. It had hundred more upvotes than other stories and was
younger too yet it was dropping fast.

