Google Drive Improves File Synchronization

Google has announced a long-overdue improvement to one of its flagship cloud storage services, Google Drive: Minor edits to locally synced files on Google Drive mount points will no longer use the less efficient method of re-uploading the entirety of the changed file(s) to Drive on sync; instead only the portions of the files (blocks) that have changed, will be transferred.

This new feature, called differential uploads, may sound minor, but it finally brings Google Drive syncing efficiency up to what many of its competitors have been offering for years–Dropbox, a popular Google Drive competitor, has incorporated this since 2021.

Previously, a single edit to a large text or video file would require the entire file to be downloaded and re-uploaded for each iteration. The new differential syncs only the parts of a file that have been changed and will be uploaded, resulting in a faster and more efficient cloud-based file system, especially for larger files when only minor modifications or updates are made. 

“This highly-requested feature results in much faster Drive syncs,” Google announced on their company blog.

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