Google Drive folder

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Nov 16, 2014
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Does anyone who is using Google Drive (cloud) know what is up with the Google drive folder? It seems to me that it would make sense for it to contain aliases of the files sent to the Google drive, to act as a local interface that mirrors the cloud Google drive, but I thought the whole idea was to be able to store large files on the cloud drive and thus save space on the computer. So why does it make full copies of the files and keep them in the Google drive folder? Some of them I even chose to keep a local copy of , but i certainly don't need two copies of a large file on my local hard drive. Can it work with aliases? I have not been able to prevent it from making full copies.
 
M

MacInWin

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Don't know exactly about Google drive, but I have used DropBox, Cubbie and Box, which are similar. The way they work is that you drop the file in the local folder and it gets copied to the internet drive (cloud) at the vendor. But if you then delete it from the local folder, it gets deleted from the cloud folder as well. If you don't want two copies on your internal drive, you drop one copy in the google folder, it gets replicated to the cloud and then you delete the OTHER copy, wherever it is, leaving you locally with only the one. Why does it work that way? Because that's how Google/Dropbox/Box/Cubbie, etc, set it up and it's THEIR service.

Currently the offerings are more for backup and sharing than for offloading from internal drives. You can move a large file to Dropbox, for example, then ask for the URL to that file and send it to someone by email. They then can download the file. That process avoids the size limits some mail providers put on attachments. Also, if you have more than one computer and if they all subscribe to the same Dropbox account, when anyone at any computer puts something into the Dropbox folder, it shows up at EVERY computer. A great way to share documents.

And that's the way it is.

EDIT: As for aliases, that would be pretty much useless in the context I've described. A remote user needs the FILE, not an alias to the file that points to a drive on a machine they cannot access.
 

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