Google Drive
Iqoniq
Posts: 6,299 Forum Member
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I'm planning to do a complete reinstall of most of the machines on my networks (9 machines at home and where I live when I work). Six of these machines can be used for gaming and I'm currently playing World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Starcraft and Hearthstone as well as a few older titles from GOG with DOSBox.
As these titles don't really mind where they're put and don't really do too much in the way of registry entries etc (with WoW I have it on my external hard drive and then generally just copy it across to whatever machine and it runs as-is). I'm wondering if I installed them all to a Google Drive directory on my machine (I'd be paying for the 1TB option), is there any reason when Drive syncs the folders to the hard drives that the games wouldn't play from that?
The machines are on most of the time anyway, and it just saves me having to run the installer on each. It'd also be an advantage with the add-ons as well because I wouldn't have to repeatedly update add-ons via Curse - it'd update them on one machine and then sync across the rest of them.
Any advice would be appreciated as I'm just thinking about trying to trim down the amount of time it takes me to do it.
As these titles don't really mind where they're put and don't really do too much in the way of registry entries etc (with WoW I have it on my external hard drive and then generally just copy it across to whatever machine and it runs as-is). I'm wondering if I installed them all to a Google Drive directory on my machine (I'd be paying for the 1TB option), is there any reason when Drive syncs the folders to the hard drives that the games wouldn't play from that?
The machines are on most of the time anyway, and it just saves me having to run the installer on each. It'd also be an advantage with the add-ons as well because I wouldn't have to repeatedly update add-ons via Curse - it'd update them on one machine and then sync across the rest of them.
Any advice would be appreciated as I'm just thinking about trying to trim down the amount of time it takes me to do it.
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What if your net access goes down between playing/saving and the next log on to google Drive? If the game played off your hard-drive mirror, then you wouldn't have the most recent save of the game, which would mess up your position at the start. You'd have to wait for a re-link before playing again.
And don't most games install something on the drive during the install process? In which case if you didn't do a machine specific install, it wouldn't work.
I'll bet I've showed some right ignorance there
Personally I think it's a disaster waiting to happen (eg Battlenet detects something funny about your installation and next thing you know you have a temporary ban while they "investigate"), but let us know how you get on.
With those games as well (or at least WoW because that's the only one I regularly copy when it gets patched - saves downloading large patches again) you can install it to one directory and then drag the game around the hard drives if you felt like it. There's a unified app for them all called the Battle.net app and you can even tell it to go and scan your hard drives for installs or tell it where you've moved them to. When the games install from the actual installer the only machine specific thing I've noticed is the short cut in the start menu pointing to the exe of the specific launcher file of that specific game. With WoW I usually install it on one machine and then drag the install to one of the external HDDs and then copy it across to the machines I want it on without installing anything except the Battle.net app.
Most of my GOG stuff is pretty ancient stuff (Syndicate came out around '93 lol), but I do see what you mean about save games. It wouldn't matter with OpenTTD because I don't copy those save files as I play sandbox usually (and just enjoy trying various strategies), but a lot of the others it would.
Thanks for mentioning that as I'd completely forgotten about Warden. Warden checks the file size and looks at the checksums, and checks for any cheating tools residing in memory (I know it doesn't scan the hard drive looking for them because I have ArtMoney Pro on a couple of machines) or DLLs trying to hook into the actual game. There's also RAM scans for other things as well that go on, but AFAIK there's not actually much in the way of directory checks I don't think. I might see if I can ask one of the blues or fire a ticket off to a GM to seek clarification though as I don't fancy getting my account suspended seeing as I've played for 6 years now (and my total play time is almost a year
I'll let you know how I get on although it's going to take a few weeks because I need to make some physical backups of documents and files, as well as asking Blizzard for clarification.