RFE: offline mode

[fommil]

It would be really great if this could be setup to work in offline mode with the cache, so that even without an internet connection I can access all my files.

I'd be happy if doing a full sync was a command that I had to run periodically.

[astrada]

I'm sorry but I don't think this feature will be easy to implement. I tried to make everything as lazy as possible avoiding to download unnecessary files and metadata. If I implement the offline mode as is, the risk is to be unable to access the majority of files, unless you explicitly download them all. Have you considered using Grive? It's a tool to sync your Drive content to a local directory.

[fommil]

Grive is unusably slow and unmaintained.

What would happen if the user were to do something that loaded all the files in Drive... would all the data then not be available in the cache? And then why not allow this to work when there is no internet connection... e.g. if the connection is flakey.

[astrada]

The problem is that you don't know in which state a cache entry is. And any entry can be invalidated at any time. But you can do an experiment. Put a very large value in the metadata_cache_time, like 100000000 seconds. This way you are sure that the server will not be polled for changes (for al least 100 days). Then do some kind of rsync to a temp dir (that you can remove later) to trigger the download of all the files. This should simulate an offline cache. Let me know it this works for you.

[fommil]

@astrada thanks, what if the files are changed in this time? (assume there are no conflicts)

[astrada]

If the changes are client-side changes (and you aren't online) you will get an error. If the changes are server-side, you won't see them. You should consider your offline copy as a read-only mirror of your Drive contents. That's because a FUSE filesystem is a standard filesystem, it does not offer primitives for remote (or distributed) filesystems.

[muranyia]

FYI Grive stopped working a few days ago.

[astrada]

There is another project to access Google Drive that should work offline.