Any way of forcing MySQL to use smaller files? This is actually Maria DB.  I'm using it on W10 and Linux Mint 18.3.

The issue here is that I recently strated to use Google Backup &amp; Sync to sync between my various machines running W10 (I'm also trying to get rclone in Linux to do the same thing).

The problem is that the main files used by MariaDB/MySQL are rather big:  ibdata1 (currently 77MB), ib_logfile0 (currently 51 MB) and ib_logfile1 (currently 51 MB).

Each time I make even a minimal change to some data on one machine it takes a lot of time for this to propagate to the other machines synched with the same Gmail Drive account.  This is because each time (apparently) the new versions of all three files have to be laboriously uploaded to the Cloud and then laboriously downloaded to the other machines.

Are there any solutions to this to make the updating between machines quicker? I just spotted the tag (here) "Google-cloud-sql" ... could this be an answer???
Don't use a generic file-based backup and sync mechanism against a database.

Those files you mentioned will almost always change, perhaps even if you do nothing.  The two log files are always the same size, but they do not have to be that big (unless you have big LONGTEXT or LONGBLOB columns).  But changing there size is tricky, and version-dependent.

Consider "Replication" ("replicas", "slaves") as an alternative way to get redundancy, but there could be issues with writing to both copies.

Galera clustering (an add-on to MySQL; included with MariaDB) is a way to have multiples copies of a dataset continually maintained in sync, and all being writable.  Also, it can be self-healing.

MariaDB is a "client-server" app.  Your "client" can be anywhere in the world; you can have any number of clients active at the same time.  The "server" can be hosted on your machine or in the cloud.  It sounds like you want it to be hosted in the cloud and 'never' go down.  That is the normal way of doing things these days.  There is no need to clone the server's data (except as a backup).  Cloud services take care of backing up (via cloning or dumping or whatever) without you taking action.