Just under a year ago, I wrote an article about how sucky Google Drive was to use. It was specifically about the Windows application, not the web-based interface.
Today, I’m happy to note that, after installing the newest Google Drive application, I’ve noticed that many of my criticisms have been remedied.
Google Drive’s New Settings Menu
1. Google Drive now installs to a folder that accepts existing files.
This was a biggie for me since my Internet is horribly slow. I already had all my Google Drive files checked out into a folder on my hard disk. The old Google Drive app wouldn’t accept anything but a clean slate then duplicated files instead of overwriting them after I copied them into the new folder. This is now fixed and Google Drive started by comparing hashes of my existing library right after installing. Yay!
2. Bandwidth controls!
If you look at the screencap above, you’ll see the bandwidth settings feature which will let you limit bandwidth used for the Google Drive app. This is REALLY handy when you’d like to do other work while syncing instead of saturating your Internet connection.
I’m super happy about both of these changes.
Is it enough for me to switch back from using BitTorrent Sync for my music and pictures? No. I don’t think anything will bring me back to storing my files in the cloud the way we used to. Edward Snowden changed all that. Still, these are very welcome changes.
What I’m using Google Drive for: publicly storing my Minecraft server‘s world files. Players who want a copy can go to the folder in Google Drive and get them. For this use-case, with these application improvements, the service works close to perfectly.
The only outstanding thing that could be remedied is an easy way to download an entire folder at once, zipped.
