Download Drive Backup And Sync
Edison Riviere
I'm looking into HIPAA compliance for Google Drive's automated backup & syncing software. I see on _functionality.html that Google Drive is HIPAA compliant, but I don't see that the backup & syncing software is. Is this an oversight or is it actually HIPAA compliant?
No. Just like the 'other sync' it is bi-directional. You can create a file in your local "test" folder and it will appear in Drive, and you can make a file in the remote location and it will appear in your local "test" folder.
Note however that the remote destination is under "Computers->your device" on the lefthand side of the Drive UI. This 'folder' cannot be selected as a sync target by a third party (i.e. another device). So you can choose to sync either:
The first part just let you specify which folders on your local device you want to be backed up to cloud. Its just its name is "My Computer"; if you are using it on a laptop, it refer to your laptop. The second part enables you to choose which items from the cloud to sync back to local device (your laptop).
"D:/Google Drive" is the source to be backed up to cloud and it can also be local location storing the files sync from cloud; "C:/some_folder" can be the source to be backed up to cloud too. "My Computer" tab in Google Drive is just a tab used for saving files backed up from local.Tip: Usually, files from local to cloud, Backup and Sync calls it "backup"; files from cloud to local, Backup and Sync calls it "sync".(personal understanding)
If you reset your machine, reinstall Backup and Sync and reestablish the backup and sync service, files in "My Computer" tab in Google Drive will be automatically restored (synced) to your local storage.
When you install Google Backup and Sync, a new folder (named Google Drive) appears on your computer. Files in My Drive (and all the subfolders selected) copy over to the new folder. You can also sync existing folders on your computers, such as Documents or Desktop. The app also lets you sync data from USB devices and SD cards as well as your photos and videos from Google Photos.
Google Backup and Sync stores all your data on your local computer. However, Google Drive File Stream stores your files on the cloud instead of your computer. Simply put, Backup and Sync is a synced folder and Drive File Stream is like an additional hard disk that lives in the cloud.
Google Backup and Sync is a great tool for users who want to sync their data. Once you have backed up your selected folders, all the files are automatically copied to the computer by default. With this app, every computer the user adds gets a dedicated entry. Most importantly, the file structure is maintained.
Backed up files are completely vulnerable to ransomware attacks and data loss due to human error. Google Backup blindly syncs malicious files to the cloud, which could infect the files on the computer and cloud via Google File Stream. The corruption will spread at a much larger scale when team members use File Stream to share files and folders.
For businesses using G-Suite, Spanning provides native cloud-to-cloud backup and restore solutions with powerful capabilities to protect critical data from loss caused by ransomware and malware attacks, human error, malicious behavior and sync errors.
Spanning is a proven and trusted solution, purpose-built for Google Workspace, unique in its ability to enable end users as well as administrators to quickly and easily find and restore data. Spanning is the most secure cloud-to-cloud backup solution out there and provides the lowest total cost of ownership among competing solutions in its class.
My setup is similar to yours, but rather than an external hard drive, my laptop contains two hard drives and I use a backup program to automatically mirror the original data onto the 2nd hard drive once per day as protection against one of the hard drives failing.
My personal opinion:
I strongly recommend to not mix up data privacy and data protection. Tools like Cryptomator are not for covering data loss risk. So you should not have your only backup being encrypted (regardless which encryption tool you are using)
1 - An encrypted vault/container on my local drive that has ALL my private content
2 - That same vault gets backed up to an external drive (also encrypted), and lastly
3 - That same encrypted vault is copied to a cloud service
In my main PC, I have 3 encrypted vaults; Personal, Family and Financial. All stored in the clouds.
pCloud - Financial vault
Dropbox - Family vault and Personal vault.
Mega - All 3 Cryptomator vaults (Financial, Family, Personal)also sync here, using RealTime Sync to monitor any changes from pCloud and Dropbox vaults. Synced only in every 24 hours. I avoid syncing it in real time, the reason is, if anything happened (like accidental delete) to my pCloud and Dropbox vaults I can still access files from Mega vaults.
I included hashfiles in all main folders in CM vaults using Exactfile. Every now and then I mount the vault from the back-up ( MEGA, FreeNAS and External drive) just to check the integrity of the files.
Thank you soooo much New Obsidian user here. The only thing holding me back was sync across devices ($10/month was too much for me given how I just wanna try it out first). But this does work like a charm. Thank you Jose!
Is there a way to sync a folder on the ReadyNAS to an USB drive instead of having it cleared and fully backuped? I have a large share on the NAS and a 2 TB USB drive attached. On this share new files will often be created and old deleted and this will quickly fill the USB drive when using incremental backups. Clearing the whole backup and then copying over 1 TB of files which were already there doesn't seem like a great idea.
As that linked thread indicates you can use Rsync. With Rsync only the changes are copied across on incremental backups and you can remove files on the backup destination that were deleted on the source.
Okay, I have configured it that way and launched the backup. After 24 hours it still haven't completed. The size is about 1 TB and almost no files have changed (something like a dozen files added on the backed up share) - I know rsync is quite intelligent, but it seems forcing it to talk locally over TCP/IP is to much overhead for the little RN102. What is more, most of the admin UI is unresponsive - it won't for example load anything in the shares tab.
Does it matter what FS is on the USB drive? This drive was my archive drive before I bought the ReadyNAS. It is NTFS formatted. I have copied all files from it to a share on the NAS (through a local backup job) and the new backup job is set up to copy files from this share to the USB drive using remote rsync with all default settings.
I recently rebuilt my RN102 using rsync to restore data from my pro-6. It ran at approximately 1 TB a day. I haven't used rsync to usb on the RN102, but it is possible you simply haven't waited long enough for the first backup to complete.
Okay, although it failed (i've setup it to backup to the /USB, but it used the backuped up share name so it run out of space), but copying nearly 1 TB took 80 hours. I've tested before copying data NAS->USB via the admin UI and it took about 40 minutes to transfer 100 GB, so the overhead of doing it the recommended way is over 10 times which is unacceptable. Any chance we get local rsync in an update? Or maybe a local rsync backup can be easily hacked through ssh?
If I choose to access any files offline it starts downloading them on disk taking unnecessary disk space since I already have all files downloaded on disk but on a different location /Users/doe/ODrive. How do I tell google drive to use those files and not download anything?
Theres a preference settings in the new google drive allowing to choose your desired directory location for google drive. If I set up that preference from the current setting /Volumes/GoogleDrive ---> /Users/doe/ODrive will that mess my ODrive folder and its content? I'd rather die than loose its content.
It seems like this is not possible. If you want to tell Google Drive to use those files and not download anything, the only option that you can do is to select the Stream Files option & then add the folder /Users/doe/ODrive on the My MacBook Pro preferences. This way, the files from your ODrive will be uploaded back to your drive instead. But, there's a catch as the uploaded files will be now be a duplicate because the Google Drive app will treat this as a new upload. And also, if you have Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms on your ODrive, the app seems to not upload these files back & it will show you an error on the app's activity screen.
Once the folder /Users/doe/ODrive on the My MacBook Pro preferences has been successfully added & synced, you will then see the ODrive folder on your drive.google.com > Computers (left side) > My MacBook Pro > ODrive. At the same time, the ODrive files are backed up and synced from your Drive to your computer and will also be available for offline use
On my observation, Folders from my computer is the section where you can see/access all of the synced folders that you've added from the Google Drive app, on the My Macbook Pro preferences. You can then view these folders and their synced files at drive.google.com > Computers (left side option) > My MacBook Pro
I am using Duplicacy Web to backup to google drive (My Drive). Having done this, I have noticed google backup and sync now takes a long time to start up, processing 100,000s of files, even though the backup folder is excluded from files to be synced.
Backing up to normal google drive seems problematic for Google Backup and Sync as it takes an age to start up as it (stupidly) scans the millions of files in the duplicacy backup even though that folder is excluded from sync. At least that what it seems to be doing in my case.
Apple apparently killed the API that allowed Dropbox and others to sync external drive folders. I see no way forward other than just beefing up the internal drives. Has anyone discovered a workaround? I use Nextcloud so I presume this will affect me also.
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