SuperDuper! backup doesn't recognize Google Drive

[Felix]

I see Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner posted a detailed explanation for his customers. Unfortunately, I'd already tried his solution with my SD! clone and it didn't work.

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Google Drive keeps a database at /Users/yourname/Library/Application Support/Google/Drive/snapshot.db. This database records, among other things, the inode number of your Google Drive folder. File and folder inodes are physical addresses that indicate where within the filesystem a particular file resides. If you read the contents of this database, you can compare the values to the inode numbers on your volumes, e.g.:

Mini:~ apple$ ls -lai /Volumes/Lion/Users/apple/Google\ Drive/
1222230 drwxr-xr-x@ 3 apple staff 102 May 14 14:22 .
391169 drwxr-xr-x+ 23 apple staff 782 May 14 16:02 ..
1222248 -rw-r--r--@ 1 apple staff 0 May 14 14:22 Icon?

Mini:~ apple$ sqlite3 /Users/apple/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Drive/snapshot.db "select inode_number,filename from local_entry"
1222230|/Users/apple/Google Drive

Mini:~ apple$ ls -lai ~/Google\ Drive/
449722 drwxr-xr-x@ 3 apple staff 102 May 14 14:22 .
449381 drwxr-xr-x+ 24 apple staff 816 May 14 16:03 ..
451706 -rw-r--r--@ 1 apple staff 0 May 14 14:22 Icon?

So in this case, I'm booted from the backup volume. You can see that Google Drive has my Google Drive folder's inode number recorded as "1222230" and that's what the inode is for that folder on the original volume, "Lion". When I look at the inode value of the folder on the backup volume, it's different. The inode number can't be preserved in a file-level backup, so Google Drive will always break when you boot from your backup volume.

Unfortunately there's no easy workaround for this. As long as Google Drive records inode numbers, it's only ever going to work with the original source volume. It doesn't matter how accurately CCC preserves the contents of these folders or the databases that store information about them, the inodes will always be different on a new volume.

To summarize:

Problem:
Google Drive reports that the Google Drive folder does not exist

Solution:
Disconnect your account from Google Drive, then sign in again to Google Drive to re-establish the "new" folder on your destination volume as the Google Drive folder.

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