Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users

Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by Dylan16807 on Saturday April 01, 2023 @03:48AM (#35398166)

Maybe if you shut a laptop while it's syncing and then start editing the same things on a different computer without considering that you should finish the sync, but that seems pretty niche.

Are you sure those people were using their own personal dropbox folders? If they were sharing with each other that's a different thing entirely and requires a lot more care to avoid problems.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by stinos on Saturday April 01, 2023 @07:17AM (#35399293)

Are you sure those people were using their own personal dropbox folders?

Yes, one single account.

while it's syncing and then start editing the same things on a different computer

IIRC this was one of the issues. Not necessarily because of shutting down, but just when using multiple computers one after the other and Dropbox not having synced in between. Not that niche depending on line of work, think lab-like setups where one thing gets deployed to multiple machines and deployment then gets tested. In one company the 'oh but you have to wait for dropbox to sync before doing that' and 'how?' responded by 'urm, yeah, check the timestamp on all files in that directory' was a rather common thing, often leading to stupid issues. Put git in the picture there and things won't get any better.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by Dylan16807 on Saturday April 01, 2023 @01:20PM (#35402058)

Oh, using it for deployment, so you're moving directly from one computer to another right after making a change and then using those files? I could see how that causes problems sometimes. I think the use case of "here is my checkout, I edit it on multiple computers, I don't use it as anything else" is a lot more reliable.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by dreamcompiler on Saturday April 01, 2023 @04:18PM (#35403695)

I think you're on to something here. It might be both safe and convenient to use git with Dropbox iff you create a bare git repo that is not in a Dropbox folder, and then specify a separate worktree that is in a Dropbox folder. That might give you the best of both worlds, but I haven't tested the idea.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by Dylan16807 on Saturday April 01, 2023 @04:33PM (#35403808)

There aren't any fundamental issues with putting the git repo in Dropbox. Under normal circumstances, to cause a conflict you'd have to do something that writes to the git folder, then switch computers, pull up the same checkout, and do something else that writes to the git folder, all within less than half a minute.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by dreamcompiler on Saturday April 01, 2023 @06:37PM (#35404861)

The fundamental issue is that Dropbox changes are non-atomic w.r.t. what git considers "atoms." See my other comment in this thread. You're right that there's usually not a problem with a single contributor, but if you ever have two or more contributors sharing a Dropbox-contained repo it will be bad news.

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Re:Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, lock... by Dylan16807 on Saturday April 01, 2023 @06:41PM (#35404895)

Sure, don't share. But there's a good use case for putting a single-user checkout into Dropbox, and that's because it adds convenience and gives you continuous backups.

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