In practice, I run the following command when I feel a sync is needed (first a dry run, then without the -dry): python updateMendeley. Then it’s just a question of copying the new articles to the Google Drive or updating the local Mendeley folder (if files have different sizes). According to Google, the changes began on July 19, 2021, with the release of a setup wizard to help you transition to Drive for desktop.

The result of the matching step is saved locally in a “cache” file to speed up future runs. Drive for desktop allows you to sync local folders to Google Drive, sync files between your computer and the cloud, and upload files to Google Drive from external devices. If two file names have more than 90% match, it assumes that it’s the same article. It uses the SequenceMatcher function from the difflib module. The matching part of the script compares each file name in the Google Drive with the file names in the local Mendeley folder. I don’t use the Android app to download PDFs anymore but I still have old PDFs that I didn’t take the time to rename. This might not be a big problem for new files but at some point Mendeley Desktop and the app I used on the tablet produced slightly different file names for the same article. I needed something slightly better than a rsync because it’s possible that the filenames are not the same between the two folders. The updateMendeley.py script is on the GitHub repo. I wrote a Python script that checks the Google Drive folder and Mendeley’s local folder, matches PDF files and syncs them.

Desktop google drive not syncing