About "Sync Google Drive to your network drive" & "hybrid approach"

#1

Hi, I’m new to Insync.

In the page “Why Insync” I read:

“Not all businesses are comfortable with going 100% cloud. Insync supports a hybrid approach where you can utilize your Windows Server and Google Drive.”

Where can I find more information about this “hybrid approach”? Let’s say I have a team of 10 people all using Insync, and a server with a shared folder we all can use, how do we set up things for this “hybrid approach”, and what are the benefits?

Thanks.
Mike.

#2

The hybrid approach is a combination of file server + Google Drive.

For it to work, you install Insync on your Windows file server and have your employees connect to the server via network drive. On the file server, you will redirect the user’s home profile folder to that of Google Drive (i.e. all the user’s Google Drive files will reside in the user’s home directory on the file server). So essentially, your team won’t need to install Insync on their laptops or desktops but connect via network drive.

That’s it.

The benefits are if you have been using the network drive approach before Google Drive, you can keep it the same :smile:

If you want to try it, we suggest you run Insync as a service: How to run Insync as a service on Windows Server

If you have further questions, ping us at support@insynchq.com.

#3

I have a question if the users don’t need to install insyc on their laptop or desktop then how can they access the file/folders while the server is down or away from the office?

#4

@Swordfish: They can’t with the aforementioned configuration. They will have to install Insync on their personal machines or access files directly on Google Drive web.

Thanks.

#5

What if we don’t use user’s home directory but a share shared to all users? Is that also possible?

#6

@Jasper_Brosens: Yes, you can simply setup Insync on one central machine with its folder(s) on the network share. You may set Windows permissions on the individual Insync folders/subfolders for specific users in case you don’t want all of them to be able to access all of the data.

Thanks

#7

I’ve been using InSync on my personal Google account for a while now and it has worked flawlessly and I would like to set it up on our work account and I need some advice on the best way to do that.

We have a network drive on our server that is set up as the L: drive on everyone’s machine. On that we store files that everyone needs access to. I would like to put most of these folders on Google Drive for everyone to be able to access from the cloud. So I have some questions on the best setup.

  • Who’s Google account should the files be synced to? Our Google administrator?
  • Will they then be the owner of all the Drive files?
  • If the owner shares all these folders with everyone, should the all the other users add them to their “My Drive”? If they do add them to their Drive, that will put them over their storage limit resulting in added cost. If they don’t add them to their Drive, they’ll have to remember to look in shared files within the domain every time they do a search.
  • If you choose to convert Excel and Word documents when syncing them to Drive, will the files on the server remain as Excel and Word files?
  • If we’re just syncing the network drive, then there is no need to have an InSync account for each user?
#8

Hello @VivaTerlingua

  • Yes, it’s better to put the files to the central/administrator’s account and then share the files/folders to users’ Google accounts with edit/view access.

  • If you upload the existing files via Google administrator’s account, yes, then they will become the owner. Subsequently, once the administrator has shared folders with everyone, whoever creates/uploads files/folders in the shared folders becomes owner of those files/folders. If you do not want this, you must share the folders without edit access but the files with edit access so that the “sharees” can’t add new files/folders but can only edit the existing files. The new files can only be added by the owner of the shared folder.

  • The users may or may not add folders to their "My Drive"s. Insync syncs both “My Drive” and “Shared with me files”. For the files that aren’t added to My Drive, Insync shows them under “Incoming shares” and waits for the user’s input on whether to sync them or not. The shared files only take up owners’ storage space on Google Drive and not of sharees. On Google Drive web, the search works across the My Drive + Shared with me files.

  • The locally created Excel and Word documents can’t be converted to Google format files through Insync. However, the Google formats files on Google Drive web can be sync’d as Excel, Word document etc. and they remain as Excel, Word files etc. locally so long as you do not change the convert options. Any edits to these local Office files does get reflected on the corresponding Google format files on Google Drive

  • You may just setup Insync on one machine with one Google account and then sync all the files to the network folder so that other users can access it. Yes, that would work but it has a few drawbacks: that machine should always be running, you would not know who created/edited what files, sometimes files added/changed via other machines may not get uploaded by Insync until next Insync restart/pause-resume (as the file system events may not be broadcast in this case - this issue is being worked upon), users on other machines won’t be able to see the syncing badges/progress etc.

Note: when you setup Insync on different machines and set up Insync folders on the network drive, you must not use the same Insync folder with another Insync app instance (or another Google syncing app). This will lead to conflicts/duplicates. Every Insync app should have separate Insync folders setup for it.

Thanks

#9

Thank you for the help. I’m trying to plan in advance before setting everything up to insure everything runs smoothly.

I would like to convert most of the existing Excel and Word files to google format. So I assume the best option is to use Google’s file uploader, then sync the files back down to the server drive? Once this is done I would delete the Excel and Word files from their original location.

#10

@VivaTerlingua Yes, you can first upload the MS office files to Google Drive (via Insync or Google’s file uploader) and then Open them in Google Docs, thus creating a new Google format file with same contents as that of the office file. Please be careful while deleting original the MS Office files - do not delete them permanently until you are sure that the corresponding Google format files have been created successfully with the correct content.