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Comment by smegel | Hacker News Reader

I used Google Drive for about 5 minutes then went back to Dropbox and haven't looked back. Firstly, finding where the hell the Google drive folder was located was a pain - then discovering it's odd internal hierarchy and the fact that trying to open files in there launched Google Docs rather than the local application default drove me mad.

Dropbox gives me exactly what I want and need: a simple folder that does sync across all my devices and opens files using the local default application.

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I'm not sure what you saw, but your Google Drive folder is just a subfolder under your user folder, similar to how Dropbox is, I believe, in your My Docs folder. You can also right click on the icon in the systray and browse to the Google Drive folder. Are you not on Windows?

I think when I installed Dropbox I was able to choose the folder, or it created a shortcut on my desktop. In truth the issue was not so much the location, but the internal structure that seemed obscure at the time (this was when GDrive first came out, might be different now).

Dropbox just appeared as a simple, normal folder. That's it. I put stuff in, it got synced. I clicked on stuff inside, and it opened like a normal file in any other folder. It just worked.

I'm pretty sure as skyhook_mockups described it's just a normal folder. GDrive is going to offer a lot once more applications start offering their services services based on what you store in GDrive which is what I see as the differentiating factor for things stored in GDrive. I imagine Dropbox will mimic it in time, but they're behind at the moment.

hmm not sure what you mean by internal structure that seemed obscure.

GDrive works just like you describe: a simple, normal folder. That's it. I put stuff in, it got synced

At some point I shut off google drive because every boot it would give me about 20 popups that it couldn't access a drive that didn't exist.

To make matters worse, I want to keep Google and Facebook inside Google Chrome, and use Safari for my normal life. But every time I clicked a document in Google Drive, it opened Safari and conveniently logged me into Google.

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