Google drive not syncing

September 3, 2015 12:47 PM

My wife and I have both been using Google Drive on the same computer (Windows 7). It's worked fine for a few years. Now hers won't sync, but mine will.

We noticed today that hers hasn't synced for 2-3 months. The program is 'unable to connect'. Can't get into drive online - Chrome tells me 'The app is currently unreachable'; IE just won't load anything.

Searching shows plenty of people having the same problem, but the two best-looking fixes (adding cookie exceptions and altering DNS) don't work. The really weird thing is that it's still working fine for me - same computer, same setup.

posted by monkey closet to Technology (5 answers total)

I had really annoying problems with Google Drive for a while. It turned out that I was signed into Chrome with one Google account and was trying to sign into Drive with another. It worked for many, many months and then suddenly one day it didn't anymore. I removed and reinstalled Chrome. On logging in to the newly installed version, everything worked again.
posted by mudpuppie at 1:03 PM on September 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's changed things. Chrome now gives an SSL error.
posted by monkey closet at 1:33 PM on September 3, 2015

Response by poster: On my account, too.
posted by monkey closet at 1:34 PM on September 3, 2015

Response by poster: OK, that gave me a clue. It seems our parental controls are blocking some SSL - for drive and dropbox. I'd just never noticed because I always work at night, when they're off.

Thanks (and no thanks to BT)!
posted by monkey closet at 2:29 PM on September 3, 2015

Best answer: Your BT parental controls probably have something that's intercepting all your web traffic (even HTTPS) using their own security certificate. Chrome (and, I assume, Google Drive) is checking this against Google's real security certificate -- which is built into the browser for just this purpose -- and rightfully refusing to proceed.

(the solution is to use something a little less draconian for parental filtering, the Google security features are difficult/impossible to bypass for some very good reasons)
posted by neckro23 at 3:18 PM on September 3, 2015