Thank you! I have covered this question in a different comment:
> In short, GCSF tends to be faster in several cases (listing files recursively, reading large files from Drive). The caching strategy it uses also leads to very fast reads (x4-7 improvement compared to google-drive-ocamlfuse) for files that have been cached, at the cost of using more RAM.
> On the other hand, I arrived at the conclusion that google-drive-ocamlfuse provides a better overall experience, as it already has an active community behind it. My goal with GCSF is to more or less close the gap between the two projects and reach the same level of functionality.
Some unwanted behavior might occur in scenarios like the one you describe. Most probably, the change performed by one client will silently overwrite the other. If there is however a small gap between the operations, the earlier one will have a better chance of being picked up by Drive and detected by the other file system instance. In this lucky case there might be no data loss.
I would set the `sync_interval` configuration parameter to a low value to improve the chances of detecting changes as soon as they appear, but I would also try to make sure that only one client works on a certain file/directory at one time.
This case looks like a good area for future improvement. Thank you for addressing the issue!
The question is not stupid at all, but the answer is :). GCSF stands for "Google Conduce Sistem de Fișiere" -- a (bad) word-by-word Romanian translation of "Google Drive File System".
Not sure what you are referring to as implemented natively in GNOME.
One crucial difference is the fact that Backup and Sync picks up local files (which exist physically on the user's machine) and uploads them to a special Drive directory in the background. GCSF does not store anything locally unless you tell it to. It simply creates a virtual directory and reports its content and file tree structure so that it matches whatever exists on Drive.
> This is neat! Can I use this for multiple accounts? I've been looking for a MacOS and Linux solution for this exact problem but I'd like to use it for 3-4 Google accounts.
The current release allows you to mount a single account for each local user. For the moment, you could work around this limitation by creating another user on your machine and running a separate instance of GCSF as the new user. I created an issue [0] and will work on adding support for multiple accounts in a future release.
> How easy is it to use a language like Rust for some web connection stuff like what is being used here? I've never used the language, but I've always been interested in it.
You can make HTTP requests relatively easily with the help of hyper [1]. In the case of this project, I was lucky to have some useful libraries readily available: yup-oauth2 [2], google-drive3 [3]. I would place Rust somewhere below Python in terms of existing tools and support (for instance, Google doesn't provide any official client libraries for Rust, but it does for Python), but making relatively simple applications is completely achievable (and fun as well) in Rust.
Thank you! I think google-drive-ocamlfuse is an excellent product. It is clearly more mature and has more features than GCSF.
I made a comparison between the two projects in sections 4.2 and 4.3 of my thesis [0]. In short, GCSF tends to be faster in several cases (listing files recursively, reading large files from Drive). The caching strategy it uses also leads to very fast reads (x4-7 improvement compared to google-drive-ocamlfuse) for files that have been cached, at the cost of using more RAM.
On the other hand, I arrived at the conclusion that google-drive-ocamlfuse provides a better overall experience, as it already has an active community behind it. My goal with GCSF is to more or less close the gap between the two projects and reach the same level of functionality.
Thank you for your response! You are correct in saying that GCSF doesn't download any data upfront. It constructs the file tree at mount time using only file metadata and downloads the actual file content only when it encounters a `read` call. This is an advantage if you're running low on local space (the file system essentially adds 15 GB of "free" additional storage).
Real time collaboration is indeed a shortcoming. I would still use the online interface of docs/sheets/slides for this purpose.
I haven't personally used Backup and Sync, as there is no Linux version of it. From what I gather, it seems that it uploads local files to a new category on Drive instead of the 'My Drive' directory. This can be useful for automatic backup. You simply set it up once and forget about it.
However, GCSF might be a better choice for the additional control it provides. Whereas with Backup and Sync you have to inspect a file manually in order to check whether it was synced or not, GCSF ensures that a pending write operation will only return once the file transfer is effectively complete. For instance, when copying a file to Drive, the execution of the command will take as long as the upload process itself. Once finished, an exit status of 0 will indicate precisely that the upload was successful and the file is certainly on Drive.
I imagine this sort of strategy is a better fit for use cases which require high confidence and predictable behavior.
I have built a tool that allows Linux and macOS users to mount their Google Drive account locally as a virtual file system. The file system supports most typical operations (creating/deleting/moving/renaming files and directories, reading/writing to them).
It can also export special Drive files as OpenOffice documents and has an in-memory cache which improves the speed of navigation and file access. Changes performed on other clients (e.g. on the web or mobile interface) are usually detected shortly and applied locally as well.
I also wrote a paper[0] on it, as I am using the project for my bachelor thesis.
It is still rough around the edges and lacks some functionality, but for the moment it is good enough for my personal use. I am looking forward to hearing your comments and feedback on how to improve it.
[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/watch