44
votes
Unfuck Google Drive (It's Gemini garbage, of course)
Turns out Google has been ruining Drive's speed by ramming Gemini down our throats (again). To get stuff loading quickly again, follow these steps:
From the Google Drive page, go to settings (top right, gear icon). Drop into "Manage Apps."
Find Gemini and uncheck "Use as Default." Of course it's automatically turned on despite my organization and my personal accounts having already opted out of Gemini. Once it's off things run much, much faster.
Presumably they're doing some dumb shit and having Gemini scan the contents of your entire drive, constantly.
As an aside, what are people looking at as a replacement? I never adopted google drive heavily, and am hosting my own stuff these days and looking into next cloud, but I hate that there's no easy "here's a link with a thing" option I can just use to send people stuff who aren't signed up with whatever.
Firefox briefly had an awesome solution for this, but I've never found a good replacement for those one off files that I send to family or friends.
Nextcloud allows for public sharing of anything you have stored in there. Just double checked it is slightly hidden though.
I personally rarely use it, but have been a happy user of nextcloud as my document syncing thing for years now.
Ahh good to know. I've only done personal testing so far and figured it was another "Need to be a member" thing. I'll have to mess with that.
It can be if you want, or not. That setting is configurable in the admin panel :)
If you're not opposed to self-hosting, copyparty is super powerful and easy to set up
Seafille is an alternative to Nextcloud for file syncing and sharing. Like Nextcloud, you get a desktop version to sync folders, and you can generate links for individual items. There are also web interfaces and mobile apps. The UI is more basic compared to Nextcloud, but can also be faster, especially on web.
If you only want a solution for sharing file, not syncing between your own devices, I like Zipline. The web IU is simple but good, and you can set up various ways to upload from desktop, e.g. from the CLI or using ShareX on Windows.
I use Tresorit, it is paid but you can share files, folders and I use it to sync some important folders
Filen was my choice for this. Has all the same sharing functions from Google Drive and it also lets you automatically back up stuff easily.
I also heard good things about Koofr.
Dropbox is still decent albeit a bit more pricey than OneDrive and Google Drive. I use Proton drive as it comes with the email/VPN subscription and I like it.
I moved off Google Drive for OneDrive some years ago, well before Gemini (or even Bard) existed, so I can't comment on the slow down you've experienced, but:
I've been told first hand from a friend who's an employee at Google that they've been scanning Drive contents since it was launched. Namely using constant algorithm searches for:
Not to excuse Gemini, it sounds like there's an additional layer of scanning that perhaps Gemini is doing. But wanted to dispel the idea that they might not have been invasively scanning before Gemini.
Thank You!