Google Drive for Desktop

[barfpony]

Hey all,

Fair warning to gdrive users, I've recently "upgraded" (read: been forced to transition by Google before October) from Backup & Sync for Google Drive to Google Drive for Desktop, which attempts to combine Backup & Sync with Drive Stream.  Launchbox, which previously loved gdrive, with its installer even telling you that's where you should put it, is not happy anymore.

The problem is, Google now force you to choose between two options:

1. Mirror, which is like the old Backup & Sync, where it just keeps a synced copy of your files in your Google Drive.  The problem is, you can't pick which folders to sync anymore; it's all or nothing.  So if you have a 2TB account, you have to sync all 2TB, or forget it.  This leaves you with the supposed "replacement"....

1. Stream, where a virtual drive is created, and all the files in your Google Drive are theoretically "available", but are actually being streamed on demand.  They can be "made available offline", and you can set where files are "cached", but they aren't just normal local files anymore; the local cache breaks up all the data into chunks for Drive Stream to work with, and then the Drive for Desktop app makes them visible to the OS as "normal" files through the virtual drive.  If you aren't running Drive for Desktop, the files are basically inaccessible.  Weird, but... OK.

So anyway, I set up stream, cached all my files, and changed the necessary paths in LaunchBox and my emulators (they're pretty much all relative paths anyway) to my magical new virtual Google Stream Drive.  The emulators all work directly, but LaunchBox will freeze my computer entirely if I try to launch anything (though it starts and lets me scroll with box art).  Big Box does the same if I even try to move around.  I'm on 11.17, though 11.11 caused the same problem as well.

I can attach what logs I've been able to collect.  There appear to be a lot of "Could not create directory junction" errors in the longest one, which makes me suspect that something about the virtual drive breaks symlinks, but I'm no expert.  It's also possible there's just a path that is somehow wrong, but it's weird that it's tanking the whole system.  Any help would be appreciated!  I get so frustrated with Google

Thanks!

[barfpony]

Since I'm griping, another annoying thing about the Google Drive Stream virtual drive thing (what a mouthful), is that because the files won't show up until the Drive app fully starts, any program icons for programs kept in your virtual drive won't show up properly after a reboot.  Definitely nothing LaunchBox can do about that, though.

[barfpony]

My temporary solution to this was to move Launchbox out of my Google Drive, then use LinkShellExtension to link my games to Launchbox's games directory (using junctions).  This means my manuals, videos, and images aren't being backed up, but that was crashing LaunchBox.  I'll keep trying!