Hi @Chris.D,
Your thinking is correct. Sync can be considered a form of backup. There are plusses and minuses to using full, bi-directional sync to “backup” your data. Since we don’t have traditional backup available, there are users that use “sync to odrive” for their own backup use case.
Sync is a much heavier process than traditional backup, so when you apply sync to more massive data repositories, like multi-terabyte external drives, or NAS, it can make odrive work really hard to continually ensure that both sides are always consistent. This can create some CPU heat, large memory footprints, and excessive network calls. Sync also needs to be much more aggressive than traditional backup, since a key component of a good sync engine is speed of reflection on both sides. In a traditional backup use case much of this sync work is wasted, because the user is never going to change anything on the remote side and local changes do not need to be reflected as quickly as possible.
Sync will sync any remote deletes to local, which is usually not something you would normally want in a traditional backup scenario. Additionally, sync has the potential to also push local deletes to the remote, which is also not something you generally want for a traditional backup. We do have the odrive trash as a safeguard against unwanted local->remote deletes, but, as you noted above, if would be a pain to have those pending deletes hanging around in the odrive trash, forevermore.
In my case, I use “sync to odrive” on the important folders on my local systems that are heavily used, as a “working backup”. Folders like: Documents, Desktop, Downloads, Pictures, Music, and Videos. The names may very slightly between OSs, but I have these default OS folders all mapped to corresponding locations in Amazon Drive.
Generally speaking, most of the files I work with on a day-to-day basis are in these locations. Mapping things in this way allows me to sync changes and additions, without me having to change any default behavior. It creates a cloud-merged view of these folders across all of my systems. Everything I touch, on any system, is automatically backed-up to the remote storage and then synced down to my other systems as placeholders or locally cached files, depending on the location and use case.
Since many applications like to default to these locations, it gives me the advantages of cloud storage and multi-system mirroring without having to configure these applications to use non-default paths. With this type of setup I also have the flexibility to move any placeholders to any other locations that are mapped. So I can move a placeholder from my Downloads folder to my Documents folder or to my Desktop. This move is reflected in the cloud and across all of my devices.
Long story short (too late), odrive is not the same as “traditional backup” and may not be the right solution for you in cases where you are working with multi-terabyte data sets, are not interested in any two-way reflection, or want to remove all possibility of deletes. For use cases that fall outside of that, the default odrive folder or “sync to odrive” folders can be very useful features and ones that I have found to be fundamentally transformative in my own use of the my local systems, and cloud.
More information on “sync to odrive”: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-sync#section-sync-external-folders
