If you are a Google Drive user (I’m on a Mac Mini M4), then when you set up local sync, there is a potentially disastrous bug in their software.
I like to have local copies of everything, so when I upgraded to a new Mac I selected “Mirror files” below and set it running. It immediately moved everything on my GDrive cloud storage to the bin (ie. treated my local empty machine as the ‘new thing’ and overwrote everything in the cloud). This is, obviously, not the behaviour anyone wants.
The ‘solution’ – after you’ve gone online into the Bin, very carefully selected everything and clicked ‘Restore‘ (not Delete forever(!)) – is to launch the application in “Stream files” mode. Then, when it starts to stream go into the finder, right-click and select “Download Now“.
The app itself has a terrible user experience for such a tiny number of options: it’s not always clear which account your are in (I have many Gdrive accounts), it’s not consistent in language and the menus often loop back to the same thing. As for trying to set it to save to an external drive, do let me know if you have any tips as this seems impossible now on the Mac M4 (apparently symlinking is the workaround … it’s 2025!).
