Certain folders won't sync through odrive on some of our systems but have no problem on other systems

We’ve been running into problems where a folder won’t sync saying “Google Error”. We can download and access the folder and it’s files through drive.google.com and we can sync the folder on other systems set up with odrive in the same way. It seems to be pretty random when a folder isn’t able to sync.

We have odrive setup to look at our Google Drive through both the computer’s user and through a shared account we only upload to for permission issues. In this last case we can’t sync through the user’s account but we can sync through our shared “delivery” account, and when we finally tried syncing through the shared account after multiple failures through the user account it started syncing right away but several of the files inside appears to be already sunk and were playable.

the set up is two external folders syncing the same Google Drive folder from the same external HD [Google Drive (charlie) & Google Drive (delivery) are both folders inside of which are folder syncing to the same folder called Writebrain Post] This setup has worked for us well for a while now and it’s only recently and only a few times where we can’t sync a folder. Any ideas? Thanks.

Hi @brenton,
Can you reproduce the issue and send a diagnostic so I can take a closer look?

Hi @Tony We just sent diagnostics from our users Raffi and Charlie. Charlie is the typical case I was writing about the other day. Raffi had a similar issue so we moved him to another account and now all files he tries to download with his account are giving him the Google Error message.

Hi @brenton,
I took a look and the error that Google is returning when requesting the download is:
“error”: {
“errors”: [
{
“domain”: “global”,
“reason”: “cannotDownloadFile”,
“message”: “This file cannot be downloaded by the user.”
}
],
“code”: 403,
“message”: “This file cannot be downloaded by the user.”
}
}
- cannotDownloadFile))

I don’t think I’ve seen this particular error before. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide much useful information other than Google is deciding to prevent the download. I can’t find anything about this particular message in their documentation, either.

Is there anything, at all, of note about these files? Are they shared with other users?

I see several trash errors for Charlie, too. The error coming back from Google is:
“error”: {
“errors”: [
{
“domain”: “global”,
“reason”: “forbidden”,
“message”: “Insufficient permissions for this file”,
“locationType”: “other”,
“location”: “file.permissions”
}
],
“code”: 403,
“message”: “Insufficient permissions for this file”
}
}
- forbidden))

I’ll usually see this error if the file that is trying to be deleted is a shared file. Google doesn’t have an API to remove shared files, so when trying to delete them you will see this error. The only way to remove these files from the user’s Drive is to use the Google Drive web client to do so.

@Tony thank you for sharing this, it’s stating to come into focus what’s happening here. For some reason members of our team aren’t shared on specific files. It’s still a bit of a mystery that files and folders surrounding the odd files aren’t effected. I’m trying to find a way to recursively update the sharing permissions through certain Google Drive folder trees, I think that should solve our problem. thanks again.

1 Like

Thanks for the follow-up @brenton! That makes sense, although it is strange that some would not have permissions.