Backup and Sync

» see google.com/drive/download as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Backup and Sync arrived on 12 July 2017 to solve a problem Google had made for itself. If you wanted your Drive files mirrored on your laptop you ran the Google Drive desktop app. If you wanted your camera roll uploaded you ran Google Photos Backup. Two programs with two menu bar icons, both doing the same job of watching folders and pushing bytes north. The new client did both and you only installed one thing.

It was a plain piece of software and it worked the plain way: you picked folders and it kept them identical in both directions, with everything sitting on your disk as a real file. Nothing was streamed and nothing was left as a placeholder stub. On a laptop with a small SSD and a large Drive that was a problem, and Google already had an answer for it, but the answer was called Drive File Stream and it was only sold to Workspace customers.

So Google spent four years shipping two desktop clients again. One for people who paid, one for everybody else.

~ the case file ~

~ what it replaced ~

The old Google Drive desktop app kept running alongside it for a while and was finally switched off in March 2018. Google Photos Backup was folded in outright. For most people the change was a single install and then nothing to think about, which is the highest compliment a sync client ever gets.

My own stake in this is the category rather than the product. Keeping a working folder identical on two machines is the sort of thing a computer engineer sets up once and then stops noticing, and between Dropbox, Drive and whatever the employer mandated, the specific client underneath was interchangeable. That interchangeability is what made the ending strange. People had no attachment to Backup and Sync as software, only to a folder that had behaved correctly for four years and then one day asked them to sign in again and refused to accept it.

~ the day it died ~

Google published the timeline on 13 July 2021 and then ran it in three steps. From 19 July the app offered a guided path over to Drive for desktop. From 18 August it started nagging users who had not moved. From 1 October 2021 it could no longer sign in at all, and that is the date the thing is dead on.

What made the last step sting was that the files were still there. Backup and Sync had always kept real copies locally, so a machine that lost its sign-in did not lose any data. It just went silent. A folder that had been mirroring for four years turned into an ordinary directory on a disk with no sign that anything had changed.

~ the inheritance ~

Drive for desktop, released in July 2021, is what you run now. It merged the two lineages: the streaming behavior from File Stream and the mirror-a-folder behavior from Backup and Sync, with a toggle to choose between them. The consumer and the enterprise client became one program, which is the same consolidation Backup and Sync itself had been in 2017, run a second time one level up. Photos syncing survived the move and then got trimmed again years later, which is roughly how everything in this corner of Google goes. Whatever you install here is the current resting place of a merge.

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