Google Backup and Sync

What works

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for your data loss, read the whole review before installing !!!!!

I tested this version on Manjaro KDE 21.0.5 with wine-stable 6.8 and the GoogleDrive Backup & Sync installer went through just fine. No errors.

As described in previous version reports you have to sign into your Google Account using the browser by clicking the link in the bottom right when the login screen appears.

If you setup an autostart job with your DE (in KDE using the settings builtin autostart feature) you can launch it on every boot and after that an icon will appear in your system tray. Although not being clickable in KDE (this should work on GNOME) this still updates (indicates a syncprocess) when you change a file or folder. To have my files accesible outside of the wineprefix I mapped a local directory through using the winecfg which I then selected as my syncdir during installation.

Sync does run normal EXCEPT THE BELOW MENTIONED FAULTS!!!!

What does not

Watch out if you have any files or folders in your Google Drive that contain an unusual character like "ä", "ü", "ö" which are very common in German for example. Because if so then all these files and folders will be deleted by the Backup and Sync client. I was lucky and could save almost all of my work by using the GoogleDrive 30 day trash in the webui, but if you are from Germany or Austria please don't use this with wine...

Some other problems were that a few of my files and folders which had an "_" in their name got it replaced with an "&". 

Additionally all my ".zip" archives were deleted aswell.

All these issues are hard to detect and may not be found out until the 30 day recovery limit of GoogleDrive's trash is reached, so be aware that you could lose some of your precious data even if you don't notice it.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Syncing very large files (multiple GB in size).

Behaviour on kernel panic.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments