I’ve just noticed that there are two configuration files in the root folder of my odrive. Both by their name and content, they appear to be configuration files used by odrive itself:
odrive_user_general_conf.txt
odrive_user_premium_conf.txt
My questions are, why have these suddenly appeared, are they in use and should they be hidden?
They appear to have been created around 21st December and I do not recall seeing them before.
Hi @dazjjackson,
These config files were added in our release on 12-14.
These files allow for some advanced configuration of odrive behavior, if desired/needed. They are loaded on odrive startup, but come with default settings. You can make them hidden, if you wish.
Hi @Tony,
Thanks for getting back to me - As long as they are supposed to be there I’m happy.
I see the same files on MacOS (10.14.3). I presume the same answer applies… but it seems pretty strange and potentially risky to have configuration files in this folder, rather than in /Library/Preferences (or ~/Library/Preferences). Is there a plan to tidy this up at some point?
Hi @andrew,
Yes they are expected to be there.
If they are deleted they will be automatically regenerated with the default values.
This location was decided on because if it accessible, but not obtrusive, and allows users to edit them easily. It also keeps them in view enough that don’t completely forget about them if they have set a non-default value. Generally you don’t need to touch these files, but they can be very helpful when you do.
Is there somewhere where all the settings are documented?
In particular, I’m not sure if I completely understand the “preventOldDownload” and “ignoreSizeMismatch” in odrive_user_general_conf.txt, and “forgetEncPassphrase” in odriver_user_premium_conf.txt
Very cool that the blacklist is configurable now; I remember that was a big point of discussion a while back when the question of syncing .git directories came up …
Makes sense to me to put them in the root odrive dir; it’s easy to find and get to and one less cross-platform difference to have to manage / think about. Also, looks like they are json format files; any reason not to put the extension as .json instead of .txt? Might help people get the format more correct; not sure how picky the parser is (thinking particularly about trailing commas after the last item of a list, etc.).
Thanks for the comments @dubaaron!
Many of these options are currently not formally documented. Mostly this is because they were created in sort of an ad hoc fashion to address special situations and shouldn’t actually be used under normal circumstances. That’s why you will only find them referenced in specific forum posts that deal with those cases. That being said, I’ll see if we can get them documented with a disclaimer.
Here are the descriptions for the ones you mentioned:
preventOldDownload - This prevents your client from downloading a remote file that has a modified date that is older than the one on your local system. This was created to address a couple of issues in larger organizations where users were inadvertently copying older files on top of newer files and then those were distributed to everyone who was sharing that storage. This shouldn’t be needed in most cases, but can be handy in multi-user shared storage scenarios.
ignoreSizeMismatch - odrive has an extra check on download to make sure that the file size matches what the remote storage reported it as. If it doesn’t match then odrive aborts the download. This is another one that shouldn’t be enabled unless there is a very specific need to, and even then it should be temporary. Unfortunately some storage providers have been seen to misreport the proper file size, so the size is always mismatched when downloading, prevent that file from ever reaching the system. In this case you will get an error pop-up indicating that there was a size mismatch. If you continue to get that for specific files, you may need to temporarily enable this feature to get past the error.
forgetEncPassphrase - When this is enabled odrive will not persist the Encryptor passphrase when you are requested to enter it for Encryptor folders. This means that you will need to enter the passphrase every time odrive is restarted and you want to access your encrypted content.
These files are json formatted, as you noted. The reason for making them .txt files was to allow something that could be edited with just a double-click action on Mac or Windows. This means that even users unfamiliar with json can replace a string with another string and save the file, when asked to do so.
We actually added official documentation, too