Syncing with external (cloud) directories is such a common thing. Providers have big incentives to lock you into their platform and don’t always provide a straightforward or full featured way to connect if you’re not using their connection tool. And there are security considerations that affect the method(s) available to connect to the account.
I’ve had a GMail account for ages because I’ve had Android phones. I got in the habit of using DropBox on the phone as a convenient storage for documents on the phone and my computers, various Linux flavors, and Windows. DropBox changed its policy and limited to two the number of devices a free account can connect with. Now I needed a way for my second computer (primary computer + phone hit the device limit) to sync files.
overGrive to the rescue! A perpetual license, with plenty of personal use seats, for something like $5 back in 2020. Buy once, install on each pc, and have full GoogleDrive sync on my local drives. Make a change using any device, save the file, open it on another device and edit the sync’d copy with the latest changes.
I change my computer’s OS from time to time or do other things that require applications like overGrive to be reinstalled which involves reauthenticating overGrive with Google. Reinstall has always gone without a hitch and GoogleDrive was syncing on the pc. I’ve done this several times over the years with no issue. And all on the same original perpetual license.
When I needed to reinstall back in January because of one of those system changes, overGrive couldn’t authenticate. Google made some changes so the overGrive authentication (and other apps using the same mechanism) didn’t work any longer. Fortunately I was at a point where I didn’t regularly switch pcs and so wasn’t relying on GoogleDrive sync so much.
For a while the folks at The Fan Club had a page up explaining they didn’t know when the issue would be resolved. Google had changed the procedure and cost of licensing and they weren’t forecasting when/if the issues would be resolved.
A recent trip to The Fan Club revealed the problem description page was gone, replaced by instructions for setting up the Google Authentication on your own. I tried them and got authentication set up. Like many guides made for new services the illustrations, label names, and functional paths of the actual website were not were not the same, or in the same order. But overGrive was working again
It still makes GoogleDrive a manual sync for files I want on all devices. So there’s still a risk I cause a sync conflict between Dropbox which is “primary” and GoogleDrive which is meant as one way copy from Dropbox.
Solutions that come to mind are a paid Dropbox account so more devices can connect, switch over to GoogleDrive for all devices, or host my own cloud. There’s plenty of options for hosting my own cloud; FileRun, NextCloud, OwnCloud, Seafile, TrueNAS Scale, and others. And some appeal to knowing no one is monitoring my cloud use.