Google Drive File Stream Issues and Crazy Bug

[david531]

I had something very bizarre happen the other day - the Google File Stream cache folder moved on its own. When it happened it then recreated itself in the original location and started syncing all over again. If someone wants to tell me this is impossible that's fine, because my questions below still apply :-).

Now after a few days I am finally resycned and here is what I see when I compare the old GFS cache to the new one. Keep in mind I have ALL files set to "offline" so I assume the folder size and number of files should be roughly the same, but as you can see while the number of folders are the same, the number of files and disc size is radically different.

How do I determine why the difference exists? How do I determine if lost data? With a syncing system like DopBox it's ridiculously easy. But how do I do it with GFS considering what occurred above?

Thank You

[david531]

Follow-Up - and here is another screenshot comparison. If I look at the size of the team drives that I sync offline, they read as 148 GB. However as noted above, the  GFS cache folder is only 109 GB. How can there be such a discrepancy? And I believe the GFS cache also holds "My Drive"? In which case I'd think it would be holding way more than 148 GB.

Thanks

[CloudGuardians]

Hi David,

You have interesting ones... 🙂
Did you delete or made any changes to the local Windows user? Or did you change settings on Windows for the default location of AppData?
Your screenshots show custom locations for the cache, which I never recommend, so this could also be related to an issue with the Drive sync client, but it's hard to know without in-depth troubleshooting.

Regarding the difference in sizes (I'm addressing the first screenshots) this could be due to a number of reason. For instance, you could have more than one folder with local cache inside the folder in the screenshot (due to previous unnoticed issues, especially related to updates of the sync client). But I'm curious to know which cache folder location is being shown in the Drive sync client settings. The "old"? The "new"? Or another one?

And about having more data online than you have locally (now I'm addressing the screenshot from your follow-up) this can also be due to several reasons, but if I had to guess I'd say that you probably have one or more hidden shared drives, or that the file explorer is getting the information about the size from the local cache instead of directly from the cloud. To test this you can use another computer (that is not currently using the Drive sync client) and log in to another account with access to the same shared drives and keep everything online only and then right-click and check the details. If you don't have another account log in with yours, but keep everything online only.

It could also be related to not having synced everything "down" yet. The sync client can run in batches and show that everything has been synced and then start again, and again, and again...

Or it could even be related to having multiple versions added to the same file (Google Drive allows you to store more that on revision of a file) but this information shouldn't reach the sync client so the local file explorer shouldn't have that information...