As it turns out, this is not happening. On my Plex media server directory, I have movies that originate in one directory with other R rated movies, that are suitable for my kids, so I have symlinked them and what I’ve found is that the Drive sync client copied up the entire movie in both locations (this really chewed through my seeding efforts to a new cloud provider)
Thanks for your feedback. Treatment of symlinks is pretty complicated since some users would prefer keeping things as links while others would like for us to follow through to the referenced location. We’ll keep your feedback in mind.
Best,
-Jeff
How about an option on how to treat them? for example, rsync:
when you do -l, it copies symlinks as links, when you use a capital L, it takes the referent files or directories? This way the user can choose the behavior.
Unless you are linked to storage that understands symlinks (for example a linux box via sftp), there isn’t really a way to pull this off. In object storage, like Amazon Drive, the concept of filesystem symlinks doesn’t exist.
We could offer an option to ignore symlinks (not follow them). We used to do this in the past, by default.
Generally speaking, we do not actually officially support using symlinks within odrive folders, at all, because, as @JeffL mentioned above, there are lots of complexities and gotchas involved.
1 Like
I think ignoring them would be fine, at least in my scenario. They only exist so a plex library scanner picks them up in a library my kids have access to, but also show up in the normal libraries without duplicating copies. Since the original itself is backed up, completely ignoring the symlinks is perfectly acceptable.
2 Likes
Just as JeffL stated:
I belong to this category of users. Even though symlinks are not supported officially I am very happy that they are supported practically. I consider it my responsibility to avoid [quote=“Tony, post:4, topic:1910”]
complexities and gotchas involved
[/quote]
Ability to follow symlinks is crucial to me for using odrive.
That being said I am not against making this configurable but for me ignoring the symlinks is absolutely unacceptable.
Please try to understand that my intention is not to fight against your suggestion. I just want to show that there really are different needs for different users.
Best regards.
No issues with your position Porok, I completely see both use cases. I have a practical use for symlinks in my filesystem to which I am trying to, specifically, not make duplicate files in the same drive, thus wanting symlinks to be treated as such. If you use symlinks to get data from a different drive your use case makes complete sense.
A configurable option would be great! even better? Configurable per folder, but I will be very happy with globally configurable. 