Uploading to Google Drive with the desktop app versus via the browser takes far less time, but... (hard drive, gmail)

[Those Who Squirm]

I need to archive some old data on my computer, so I started a Google Drive account, and signed on to rent 200GB of space for a couple of dollars monthly. Sounds like a good deal, right? But when I began uploading my older data, it seemed to take an extremely long time, like two days to upload a few gigabytes of data. It's not hard to -- ahem-- google for questions and complaints about this, but I hadn't seen any really good answers, until I installed the Google Drive desktop client. I came to that decision via a different issue I was having, which is that the browser version of Google Drive doesn't have a convenient way of finding out how many objects are in a GD folder, how much space they are taking up, or doing the same for a selected subset of objects in a folder. Installing the desktop client, I read, would solve that problem.

Having installed Google Drive, I found not only does it let you explore and manipulate your Google Drive folders completely seamlessly along with your local data, it also processes uploads much, much faster, by a factor of at least ten, as far as I can tell. In fact, it seems to run faster even than when I download data from my hard drive to a USB drive plugged into the same computer.

What I need to know now is this: Is this real? Is it really working as fast as it appears to be? Obviously I can't verify everything that I'm trying to archive, but from a few random spot checks, everything appears to be in order. I'm pleased to see it working so fast, but I'm hesitant to delete the originals off my hard drive, until I know for sure. Has Google Drive appeared to upload the data, but in reality only copied over the file and folder names, and will, over time, gradually populate them with the actual data? Which would mean that I have to leave my original files in place?

And in case anyone's wondering what my upload speed is, it's usually around 6 - 10 Mbps, but when I checked it just now it came in at a very slow .4 Mbps. I really don't understand what's going on.

[TurcoLoco]

Sounds a bit mysterious but that is normal as quite a few information that can shed light to it, seemed to be missing. I have been under the weather so my IQ feels slightly lower than usual, somewhere between Carl Spackler and Biff Tannen.

Please share some info so those who are savvy can make some sense and chime in:
- What is the specs, age and type of your computer
- What OS are you using?
- Are you connecting to Internet via Ethernet or WiFi?
- What browser do you normally use?
- Have you tried another browser to check?
- Are you using any kind of VPN software?
- Have you ever done a system recovery on this machine? If yes, why?
- Has this machine ever been infected with malware or properly scanned for it? If yes, share details.


Google Drive is actually the only popular account that gives you 15GB storage limit just by having a Google account like a Gmail address, even Box caps it at 10GB while both OneDrive and DropBox caps free accounts at 5GB.

Due to its "collaboration" feature, it pretty much guarantees that it is not merely a syncing app. It should really, completely copy each file to its cloud servers. If you wanted to test this yourself, you could use a frivolous but larger size file (something at least couple of hundred MBs should be suitable).
Upload it to GD, once it appears there with the same size, delete (not just Recycle Bin) the original from your computer. Then see if you can download it back from GD and open/view/modify it.

You mentioned you signed on to 200GB plan, which based on the info on this page, should give you access to free technical help from its experts (just to keep in mind as an option):

Members who pay $2.99 per month, for example, have access to Google experts who can help with any Google-related questions, like how their products work.

Hopefully, this much info will get the ball rolling for this thread and you.

[gguerra]

I would not delete anything from the hard drive, period. Google drive should be a backup, not your only copy of anything important. Invest in an external drive and place a copy there if you want to delete it from your C: drive. Externals have been dirt cheap as of late

You can also map a drive letter if you haven't already.

One thing I did notice with the google drive for desktop is that it replicates everything locally, eating up more of your hard drive space if that is a concern. What is probably happening is it's making a local copy and slowly uploading it. You can confirm it's on the cloud by looking through your browser. Try opening one or more of the files from there.

You can manage the amount of space it uses on your hard drive.

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/10838124?hl=en

I never leave just one copy of anything especially not just on the cloud.

[Yelling_at_Birds]

I just want to echo what gguerra emphasized. Nothing beats a physical copy in your possession. Best practice is to follow the 3-2-1 method:

3 different backup copies
2 across two different mediums
1 with one off-site