Overview

RaiDrive is a native macOS menu bar app that keeps local folders in sync with Google Drive, built as a low-overhead alternative to the official desktop client. It treats the local copy as the source of truth, stays out of the way (menu bar only, no Dock icon), and keeps a small memory footprint even with 100K+ files.

Key features

• One-way-priority two-way sync with a local-wins conflict model: local additions, edits, and deletions propagate to Drive, and files removed on Drive but present locally are re-uploaded
• Smart skip: files unchanged by modification date and matching the last-synced MD5 are skipped without re-hashing or network calls
• Incremental remote sync through the Drive Changes API, so repeat syncs only fetch what actually changed
• Parallel folder traversal (up to 10 concurrent requests) and resumable, chunked uploads for large files, streamed from disk
• Anti-duplicate uploads plus one-click cleanup of pre-existing Drive duplicates

Technical details

Sync engine

• Streaming MD5 hashing and 8 MB chunked uploads keep memory flat on huge folders
• Exponential-backoff retry on transient failures, automatic OAuth token refresh, and self-write suppression to avoid FSEvents feedback loops

Power management

• Detects AC vs battery via IOKit Power Sources and schedules work with NSBackgroundActivityScheduler so syncing is thermal and power aware
• Throttles or pauses on battery, stays armed for Power Nap on AC, and reacts live to plug/unplug and sleep/wake events

Architecture

Built in Swift and SwiftUI around a MenuBarExtra scene, with focused services for Google auth, the Drive v3 REST client, the FSEvents watcher, Keychain token storage, and power monitoring, coordinated by a single sync manager and an on-disk metadata store.