An early look at Google Drive File Stream

Google is introducing a new feature called Drive File Stream which will present your GDrive as a local mapped resource on your Mac or Windows PC.

Another utility, Google Drive Sync does something similar but Drive File Stream is different in that it works like an “intelligent cache” so the files appear local without actually being copied down.  In this respect Drive File Stream has more in common with Dropbox’s Smart Sync feature for Dropbox Business customers.

Once installed you can work directly from all the familiar Windows apps like Microsoft Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. Any change you make to files in those apps is saved automatically to GDrive to be accessed from any other device.

Google Drive File Stream will go GA on September 26th 2017. With this launch, Google Drive for Mac/PC is officially deprecated. It will no longer be supported starting on December 11th, 2017, and it will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018.

Let's take a look  at some of the features available in the early adopter offering. Testing used a five year old laptop running Windows 8.1, probably typical of the type of device it would need to support in the field.

Currently the installation is via a download site without any options to adjust the installation parameters. As Drive File Stream is aimed squarely at the enterprise space we can assume this will change by the time it moves to GA.

The installation is extremely light and installs a device driver that presents your Google Drive as a G: drive. While in the EAP phase there doesn't seem to be any method of controlling the drive allocation.

During the installation the user is asked to re-enter Google user credentials and accept authentication rights. Once accepted the user is not re-prompted on subsequent logons.

As soon as the driver is loaded the user is immediately presented with a personal GDrive mapped as G: with any Team Drives shared with the user appearing at sub-directories at same level.

Files and directories respond as you would expect to the standard windows key functions and dialogs. Most file actions are supported including the deletion of GDocs and non-GDocs.  The files turn up in the GDrive trash in exactly the same way they would if the action was completed from the web UI. The only thing that's not supported at present is cut-and-paste to create a new GDoc.

Interestingly the properties of the Drive File Stream (G:) show as a FAT32 partition with 1EB (exabyte) of capacity. The format function is also available but I didn't feel brave enough to try that!

Dragging files into the the G: drive immediately returns control back to user as the file is cached locally and transferred to GDrive as a background process. The arrow icon on the Drive updates to reflect the backgound activity.  A file added to GDrive through the webUI turns up in the G: drive also immediately. In fact any amendment to GDrive is reflected within seconds.

The icons on each file also give some indication of status. Icons with the small cloud overlay indicate files that have been moved to GDrive  In this case the icon represents a local placeholder and if selected the file will be downloaded before being opened.  

If the file is fairly large the user may well see a dialog and the arrow icon on the drive indicating progress of the download. 

Once the file is downloaded all actions take place locally with the save action being to the local drive cache with the sync following on as a background process.  

Actions on G Suites documents are unchanged. Clicking on a Google doc icon will open a browser editing session working directly from the cloud store. 

Copying or moving local documents into the G: drive will initially result in a file icon without the cloud overlay. The icon is only updated once the file or folder has been transferred back to GDrive.

However this is where it gets clever. Drive File Stream is trying to guess what you might do next and is pre-loading the file cache with files that it thinks you might need. For instance opening a Word document, writing back and closing Word goes through all the actions to synchronize to the cloud and when it’s complete the icon will show a cloud overlay. However reopening the file a second time does not force another download, Drive File Stream has cached it, guessing that you might just be coming back. When opening the file after a write back the local icon doesn’t update to indicate a read from Drive - the file just opens.

You might might see an odd action here as opening the file shows data being written back to GDrive rather than from it. What appears to be happening is that the file is opened on a local cache but Office creates a temporary file in the same directory which is written back to GDrive -  although the file never actually displays. This is speculation on my part but it would be interesting to know how Drive File Stream handles application temporary files.

There is little information on how the intelligent caching of Drive File Stream works but I guess that's the point. It just sits in the background becoming familiar with your work processes and making sure that when you open a files it’s ready and available. Machine Learning (ML) is going find it's way into an increasing number of products in the future so we need to get used to the idea that the machine will be thinking for us.

If a non-Google document stored on GDrive has been edited in another remote session it always forces a refresh and you’ll get the latest version. I found this process to be very reliable and responsive.

However writes to non-Google files have to be treated with caution. Standard files are not access locked and can be edited by two users at the same time, the last write wins. Other writes are saved as versions and can be downloaded and manually recovered but without the simple reversion facility available to Google docs. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue for the single user working with GDrive but Drive File Stream also exposes the Team Drives which may have editing rights granted to multiple users.

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Even in EAP, Drive File Stream is very impressive and could be used to solve a number of problems. 

Where I see this being most useful is in Windows terminal sessions or ICT labs where you could now use GDrive as the primary storage area rather than a Windows share. There are still a few enterprise features missing, mainly around deployment and configuration options but the basic functionality is sound. 

Altogether a welcome addition to the Google toolset.

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