Is it alright to use Google Drive and Syncthing together?

[Brenzle]

I have a folder on my Windows 10 PC that I want to access from my Android phone (Files app) and from my Ubuntu Linux laptop (Nautilus file manager). On both Android and Ubuntu I want to have it available locally (offline).

On Ubuntu, there’s an option to log into my Google account so I can access Drive files through Nautilus, but this doesn’t allow me to access the “Computers” section of Drive, only “My Drive” which does not contain the desktop folder I’m syncing (on Windows, ). Even if it did, there’s no option to make a folder available offline like there is on Windows.

I started syncing the folder to my phone and laptop using Syncthing and it works good. I wanted to easily share the folder or subfolders with others, so I started syncing it with Drive too (from the PC). I’ve been using this setup for 2-3 months now and I have noticed some files getting multiplied and labeled with “sync-conflict”.

Is this setup the cause of the conflict files? Is this a major issue or can I just keep using this setup and deleting the conflict files? If it is, what could be a better solution to still have a cloud copy of this folder on Google Drive or some other cloud storage?

[gadget]

@Brenzle

On Ubuntu, there’s an option to log into my Google account so I can access Drive files through Nautilus, but this doesn’t allow me to access the “Computers” section of Drive, only “My Drive” which does not contain the desktop folder I’m syncing (on Windows, ). Even if it did, there’s no option to make a folder available offline like there is on Windows.

Google doesn’t currently provide a Google Drive desktop client for Linux, so on-demand access is the most common way of using Google Drive on Linux – files are uploaded/downloaded as they are being used so there’s no offline mode.

I started syncing the folder to my phone and laptop using Syncthing and it works good. I wanted to easily share the folder or subfolders with others, so I started syncing it with Drive too (from the PC). I’ve been using this setup for 2-3 months now and I have noticed some files getting multiplied and labeled with “sync-conflict”.

Likely an artifact of the timestamps being off due to the uploading/downloading.

Is this setup the cause of the conflict files? Is this a major issue or can I just keep using this setup and deleting the conflict files? If it is, what could be a better solution to still have a cloud copy of this folder on Google Drive or some other cloud storage?

If you’re sure that the conflict files aren’t needed, you can just delete them. The maxConflicts setting might be useful for your setup, but keep in mind what it means before disabling it (and of course, don’t forget to have a backup plan just in case).

If you prefer to have Linux sync to Google Drive, definitely consider using rclone.

But either way, I would avoid the complexity of having multiple computers syncing to/from Google Drive if you’re already using Syncthing to maintain local/offline copies of the same files. Pick just one computer for syncing to/from Google Drive to lessen the chances of conflicts.