Google Drive interval for checking for new files

I Have a Question
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1

Hi folks,

How often does the desktop (Windows in this case) client check Google Drive for new files? Is it polling, or is there some fancy push-based system?

I ask as I’m creating new files on one machine, and checking my Odrive sync folder on a collaborator’s Windows machine. There are multiple minutes at least before new files are synced… Thus far I’ve gotten bored of waiting, and hit “refresh” in Windows Explorer before seeing the new file pop up of its own accord.

I saw that remoteScanIntervalMins can be set on premium subscriptions, but it also says that “Storage sources which have dedicated calls for change detection (i.e. most modern cloud storage providers) get updated much more frequently through a separate mechanism.” Is Google Drive one of these? How long should I be waiting for new files to turn up?

I’d turned to Odrive because the Google Drive desktop app required manual intervention to get it to sync new files in a shared folder. I’m really hoping manual intervention isn’t required here too! Perhaps this is some limit of the Google Drive API, relating to it being a shared folder?

2

Hi @daniel1 ,
Background detection of remote changes on Google Drive should take around 1-3 minutes, under normal circumstances. This can be delayed if odrive is in the middle of a full background scan (which happens very infrequently, but is performed on odrive startup) or if odrive is already busy actively syncing.

Immediate refresh of a folder will occur when you browse into it via Finder or Explorer or if you right-click->refresh the folder (as you mentioned above).

3

Thanks!

As an aside, do you know if there’s any way to do the equivalent of a Windows Explorer refresh programmatically, via the command line?

4

Hi @daniel1,
We have a CLI that can be used to issue commands to the sync engine, including ‘refresh’.

You can download the CLI here

5

Ooh, that’s awesome! Thanks for pointing that out, and thanks to whoever was forward-thinking enough to build a CLI in the first place :smiley:

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