Backup (one-way sync)

[Tony]

Hi @scott.schneider,
I know that Amazon Drive’s failure yesterday really messed things up for folks when odrive synced based on the information Amazon Drive was returning at the time (no files/folders in the drive). We feel terrible about it.

Unfortunately there isn’t currently way to prevent this in odrive. I wrote a small post about it here, which goes into it a little more.

Sudden Disappearance of all Amazon Drive Files - 2017 - 01 - 23 - * RESOLVED *

We want to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. A cloud storage service provider, like Amazon Drive, should never, ever return an empty list of items with a 200 OK response unless the items are actually not there. There is a required trust in the sync relationship that the service provider is providing accurate information. The cloud service is considered the authoritative source for the linked storage and when changes are made on the remote they need to be synced to local…

As for odrive as a backup solution, you can read my thoughts about this on this previous post in this thread:

Backup (one-way sync)

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 continual…

The bottom line is that you can’t use current odrive for traditional backup (one-way sync) because it is a two-way, near real-time sync product.