Well, following my email to them, I got a helpful reply from the Insync HelpDesk to the effect that "...check your account in the app? According to our end it is already active. It might have just timed out temporarily."
So I checked it again and sure enough it was working OK. Good support!
However, after playing about with it for a while, I really couldn't see exactly what Insync did that Google Drive didn't. I thought I probably didn't understand it fully yet.
Then I discovered today that Insync has effectively defeated some Google Drive functionality - it has taken over control of the Google Drive folder on my client device (laptop), so that:
- (a) Google Drive Sync can no longer function (OK, I thought, Insync has probably replaced that functionality with something better).
- (b) I can now no longer access Google Drive directly from the client - e.g., right-clicking a file in the Google Drive folder on the client now does NOT allow you to get the sharing link for that file - that was a feature that I used quite a lot, and found it to be immensely useful.
Then, again today, using the SlimJet browser (a Chromium derivative that I have just started trialling), I looked at the Google Drive blurb at
https://www.google.com/drive/#start , and saw all this new FREE functionality that Google have recently introduced into Drive whilst I was sleeping, some of it apparently best appreciated with Chrome/Chromium (surprise! NOT.), and I realised that all that new FREE functionality seems to have made Insync obsolete - i.e., there is apparently now nothing that Insync does which you can't do in Google Drive,
BUT there are some things that you can do in Google drive that you can't do in Insync.
I could have been mistaken, I suppose, but even after hunting about in Insync, I really couldn't see why there would be any advantage in using it at all now. It seems to have been
left behind, and as a differentiator it just seems to have a next-to-useless, cruddy little app-like interface on the client.
So I've uninstalled Insync and am in the process of reverting to using Google Drive on the client as I had done previously.
Maybe it was that dreadful reality of obsolescence that was behind Insync suddenly offering their software for free for "a limited time"? Remember their countdown clock? Same as BitsDuJour. (Introducing false scarcity and/or false time-pressure as motivators is an old, tried-and-tested sales con-trick. Like fear of potential loss - e.g., "It'll never be this cheap again!". Consumers would be wise to be cautious and avoid being induced into playing that game when they see such tricks being used.)
