Can I put the Odrive on an external hard drive instead of my PC?

Right now the odrive is a great for combining all of my google drives for work…However I have to have them constantly syncing and it takes a ton of memory from my PC.

Can I redirect the odrive to save and sync on a hard drive that is constantly connected to my PC?

Hi @faithg,
If you don’t need everything synced, all the time, unsync can be used to reduce the drive space used: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-disk-space#unsync-old-files

You can even set auto-unsync rules to automatically unsync any files that have not been modified within a certain period of time: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-disk-space#configure-auto-unsync

Unsync will clear the disk space by replacing the selected files with placeholder files, which represent the remote files but take up no disk space on your computer.

I would suggest trying to use unsync to free up disk space, before trying to move any folders. Auto-unsync should allow you to free up disk space for all of the items that you do not need immediate access to and is basically a "set-it-and-forget-it " configuration option.
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It is possible to move the odrive folder to another location using the “Move odrive folder” function. https://docs.odrive.com/docs/odrive-usage-guide#move-odrive-folder-to-another-volume

Moving the folder will create a brand new folder in the new location and leave the old one in its current location, so you will need to sync the contents down again if you go this route.

We don’t officially support moving the folder to an external drive because it can cause some performance issues, but it can be done with success, depending on your use case and usage patterns.


Our supported method is using “sync to odrive” to map a local folder to a remote location: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-sync#syncing-external-drives-sync-to-odrive

Tony,

You and I have actually been talking about another issue with ODrive as far as not syncing correctly with google drive. I was actually under one of my employee’s id’s to speak with you because we had removed odrive from all of our computers to see if we could get it running smoothly again.

We have about 324 google drives on each of our odrives (6) that need to constantly sync with google drive. We sponsor daycares in the food program and they scan in documents and receipts all the time through scanners that are connected to individual google drives. Odrive is a central location for all of our google drives and we can do a search for a folder that contains new scans in each center.

So back to my original question, LOL can I redirect Odrive to an external hard drive?

Hi @faithg!
I would actually still recommend the unsync method before trying to move the folder, if feasible, but moving the folder is possible with the “Move odrive folder” function mentioned above (under the image).

Keep in mind that using the unsync method will not prevent you from searching for the scan folders, so your workflow will still work the same. Unsync will just turn older files that have not been modified in a while into placeholder files (.cloud). These files can always be downloaded again, whenever you need access to them, but will not take up any disk space on your computer until then. Given your workflow it sounds like you are mostly working with new files (recent scans), so these files would still be downloaded automatically. If you set auto-unsync for 1 month, then any files that have not been modified within the last month would be automatically unsynced, freeing up the space.

By the way, are you seeing better behavior now? I had some other ideas about

A post was merged into an existing topic: Odrive not syncing timely with google drives

How would oDrive treat external HD folder mappings when its disconnected? Would it wait for it and then execute syncs if required / enabled/ manually triggered?

Hi @AST,
odrive will detect that it is missing and mark the mount as missing/invalid. It will not perform any further sync actions on that mount until it is found again.

When the external drive returns, you can click on that mount listing in the odrive tray menu under “Sync to odrive” to prompt odrive to re-check the paths.