Google Drive reports that the Google Drive folder is missing

May 11, 2012 @ 11:22 pm

hi,
i am trying to make a full clone backup drive, but when i boot off the newly cloned drive neither 'dropbox' nor "google drive" are loading. and CCC suddenly appears on the desktop...? i have tried three times now. any ideas? thanks... corky

CCC Report ID: 9699

1 Posted by Mike Bombich on May 11, 2012 @ 9:20 pm

I've heard of the Dropbox issue, but the Google Drive one is new. I added that to this section of the documentation:

Non-registration-related, application-specific oddities [LINK NO LONGER EXISTS]

Mike

2 Posted by corky james on May 11, 2012 @ 9:47 pm

hi mike,
thanks! regarding "google drive"; it says that it can't load because there is no "google drive" folder, even though there actually is one! and the app is in the applications folder...

On Fri, May, 11, 2012, at 18:21 , Mike Bombich wrote:

PLEASE REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE Any part of your response that is below this line will be discarded

3 Posted by Mike Bombich on May 14, 2012 @ 4:30 pm

Hi Corky:

I tracked down the problem on this one. Google Drive keeps a database at /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/Google/Drive/snapshot.db. This database records, among other things, the inode number of your Google Drive folder. File and folder inodes are physical addresses that indicate where within the filesystem a particular file resides. If you read the contents of this database, you can compare the values to the inode numbers on your volumes, e.g.:

Mini:~ apple$ ls -lai /Volumes/Lion/Users/apple/Google\ Drive/
1222230 drwxr-xr-x@  3 apple  staff  102 May 14 14:22 .
 391169 drwxr-xr-x+ 23 apple  staff  782 May 14 16:02 ..
1222248 -rw-r--r--@  1 apple  staff    0 May 14 14:22 Icon?

Mini:~ apple$ sqlite3 /Users/apple/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Drive/snapshot.db "select inode_number,filename from local_entry"
1222230|/Users/apple/Google Drive

Mini:~ apple$ ls -lai ~/Google\ Drive/
449722 drwxr-xr-x@  3 apple  staff  102 May 14 14:22 .
449381 drwxr-xr-x+ 24 apple  staff  816 May 14 16:03 ..
451706 -rw-r--r--@  1 apple  staff    0 May 14 14:22 Icon?

So in this case, I'm booted from the backup volume. You can see that Google Drive has my Google Drive folder's inode number recorded as "1222230" and that's what the inode is for that folder on the original volume, "Lion". When I look at the inode value of the folder on the backup volume, it's different. The inode number can't be preserved in a file-level backup, so Google Drive will always break when you boot from your backup volume.

Unfortunately there's no easy workaround for this. As long as Google Drive records inode numbers, it's only ever going to work with the original source volume. It doesn't matter how accurately CCC preserves the contents of these folders or the databases that store information about them, the inodes will always be different on a new volume.

To summarize:

Problem:

Google Drive reports that the Google Drive folder does not exist

Solution:

Disconnect your account from Google Drive, then sign in again to Google Drive to re-establish the "new" folder on your destination volume as the Google Drive folder.

Mike

4 Posted by corky james on May 14, 2012 @ 8:27 pm

hi mike,
impressive! i think that did the trick. thanks. and dropbox just makes you log in again. appreciated the help... corky

On Mon, May, 14, 2012, at 13:30 , Mike Bombich wrote:

PLEASE REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE Any part of your response that is below this line will be discarded