Restoring Google Drive to a Back-up

Question

So. My Google Drive just died. Their support staff tell me I've got to disconnect my drive and re-install the Google Drive app and use 44GBs of bandwidth to re-download everything. It's their fault so I'm getting a refund this month.

The thing is that my Google Drive is not able sync the changes on my PC (hours/days worth of work) to the cloud. It keeps failing. So, I'd be downloading an out-of-date version. I've saved a back-up of the drive as is.

Does anyone know of a method, once my out-of-date Google Drive has finished downloading, to add the changes in my back-up to the out-of-date downloaded copy? Or, at the very least, to track the differences between the two versions so I can manually add all my work back in?

(And yes, I'd totally switch to DropBox if it were not for the the fact that it would (has) taken months to upload 44GB given my current connection. It's probably less trouble staying with Google.)

Answer 1

If I understood correctly, you have a Google Drive folder synced with the cloud, but the Drive program fails to synchronize the changes that you made on your PC, so you have an outdated snapshot of your work on GDrive cloud.

Have you already tried to uninstall the Drive app, move the drive folder content to a different location on the hard disk, reinstall the app, copy (so that you keep a backup of the up-to-date work) the contents back to the newly created folder and let the app index the content again? maybe this will allow you to upload just the changed files.

By the way, there are many programs that allow the comparison of files and folders. Their effectiveness depends on the type of files and their size. One of these programs is the open source WinMerge, which, I think, doesn't handle the replacement, but just lists the changed files. There is also Microsoft SyncToy, free to download.