Any way to map existing laptop folders already synced to my services?

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I’m trying to work out how to handle the files and folders I already have synced on my laptop.

Ideally, I’d love to be able to just tell it that that’s where Dropbox, Amazon, Google etc are already stored on my laptop but I’m not really seeing a way to do that.

Am I missing something?

Would I need to sync that to the Odrive folder and then delete the old ones? Wouldn’t really be fond of that solution…

TIA,
Tracy

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Hi @trraacy,
Some users have done this by moving the data over from the other service folders (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) into the corresponding locations in odrive. odrive attempts to reconcile the local and remote data in a way that prevents re-upload of identical data. In most cases it works well, but it will depend on a few factors, including the storage source being used.

So, for example, if you were move the contents of your Dropbox folder into odrive\Dropbox, odrive will try to reason out the state of those new files and determine if they are already synced.

The steps would work something like this (again, using Dropbox as an example):

  1. Close the Dropbox app
  2. Navigate to the odrive folder and expand only the root of the Dropbox folder. This would equate to right-clicking->sync on the Dropbox.cloudf placeholder, sliding the slider to “Nothing” and making sure both checkboxes are unchecked. This will cause odrive to expose only the root of the Dropbox folder
  3. Navigate to the original Dropbox folder (not the odrive one), and select all of the content inside.
  4. Copy all of the content selected in step 3 into the odrive\Dropbox folder, alongside the placeholder files. The copied data will parallel the placeholders and they will exist alongside each other for a brief period until odrive starts reconciling the new data.

At this point odrive will scan through all of the new data you copied in, try to determine its state, and then mark the files that already exist in the cloud as synced. Once everything looks good you can remove the local Dropbox data from the original folder. Make sure Dropbox is not running when you do this or it will pick that up as a delete.

My recommendation is to always first try this on a small subset of the data to make sure the result is what you are expecting before copying over everything.

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I would like to clarify specifically with regard to Google Drive, which has a number of idiosyncrasies.

In my case, I have a little over 1TB of data that was being kept in sync with Google Drive’s Windows client (until it started crashing & Google advised me that it was due to the large number of files being sync’ed). So I am considering using odrive instead.

In my use case, I need for all files to be on that local machine. It serves as a local repository and however any file is created or updated by anyone on the shared folders, I want to be sure a full copy ends up fairly timely locally in that repository. (I.E., not placeholders, but the actual files).

Right now, over 90% of the files are present (those that sync’ed before Google Drive Client started misbehaving). I would prefer not having to download those files again.

But what really scares me is that Google has no problem having two (or more) identically-named files sitting in the cloud in the same location. I had an incident once in the past where hundreds of files were re-uploaded to Google Drive from the repository, replicating (not replacing) files that were already there. I had to go through hundreds of pairs of files manually, figuring out which one of each pair was the up-to-date one and deleting the other. I do not relish the thought of doing that again.

The second thing that scares me is that some of the files that are presently in the repository are obsolete, having been updated in the cloud. I would not want them to overwrite the cloud files losing the newer version already in the cloud.

Is there a straightforward solution to this? Is odrive smart enough to avoid the gotchas of Google Drive? Or will I have to compromise and re-download >1TB of data to be safe?

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Hi @yosh,
As you said, the safest method is to re-download the data.

This is probably the clincher. If you follow the method above, files that are different are going to be uploaded. odrive assumes that any files a user adds to the odrive folder are files they want uploaded. This means your local versions will be uploaded over the remote ones. Google has versioning, so you shouldn’t actually lose data, but it can sure throw a wrench in the works.

Do you know how many files/folders, total, you have? I am curious what the threshold was for the Google client.