I’ve had odrive auto-synced to several folders on my computer for a couple months now with no problem. Today I saw that I have 2 file folders which are now completely empty. I can’t find the contents in my odrive, trash, or computer recycle bin. I only have one computer synced with odrive. Why did this suddenly happen? What do I do? I have a much larger folder that contains extremely important information, I would go out of my mind if that suddenly disappears (I’ve disabled sync on that folder for the time being).
Hi @jade-soleil,
The behavior you are describing sounds like the remote storage folder was reported as empty at some point. Since odrive is a full, bi-directional sync engine, it will sync deletes from remote to local. Some questions.
What do you see on the remote storage? Does that corresponding folder have content in it?
What is the remote storage service?
Can you send a diagnostic from the odrive menu and provide the relevant folder path info here so I can take a look?
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the response. There are no longer any corresponding folders in my remote storage (amazon drive) either. I rarely log into my amazon drive since the odrive auto-sync does all the work for me. So the chance of something being accidentally deleted in the amazon drive is essentially zero. I sent the diagnostic through the menu and my folder paths are:
E:\Pictures\Photography\Tcherny
E:\Pictures\Photography\For Selling
When I ask odrive to sync those 2 folders from its button tray location, it tells me “
For Selling in E:\Pictures\Photography could not be synced.
Amazon Cloud Drive could not find a folder/file that odrive was looking for.”
When I go to the actual folder location on my computer and right click it > sync to odrive, it does nothing.
Thanks again.
-Rebecca
Hi @jade-soleil,
I took a look at the diagnostic and, as expected, Amazon Drive is reporting those two “sync to odrive” target folders as not available.
I can’t tell what happened since the diagnostic only goes back a little ways and it looks like odrive was restarted recently. If those folders were somehow deleted, they should still be in the Amazon trash. It is also a possibility that they were moved somehow.
What is really interesting here is the nature of this scenario. The way that odrive links “sync to odrive” folders, there is actually no way for odrive to delete, move, etc the target folder (its not exposed to the user) at that location. The only way it would be possible is if:
- It was deleted/moved by something else, outside of odrive
- It was user-deleted using the corresponding location inside the default odrive folder (C:/Users/Cherohala/odrive/Amazon Cloud Drive)
- Amazon removed the folders themselves
You said above that you don’t use anything else to interface with odrive, so it seems unlikely that 1. happened.
I have seen 2. happen when users mistakenly delete files/folders out of the odrive folder, trying to get rid of “duplicate” local data, since the data is also in their linked “sync to odrive” folder.
I have only seen 3. happen to 1 user, so far, and we were never able to figure out why. This also seems unlikely.
In any case, if the data was deleted it should still be in the Amazon trash:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/trash
Please look at the trash to see if the folders are there. If they are you can restore them and everything should be back in order.
Otherwise, you can search for the folders, or the files inside, via the Amazon search function. For example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/search/Tcherny
Hi Tony,
I checked my Amazon Drive trash and the folders were there but also empty…which doesn’t make sense to me because even if I deleted the stuff by accident out of my computer, somehow, and amazon synced those changes then it would still show up in trash right? It looks like everything else that I’ve purposefully deleted from my synced folders seems to be there.
Maybe 2. happened but it seems unlikely to me as I leave my odrive folder alone for the most part, and again I think it should still show up in the trash?
Thanks,
Rebecca
Hi Rebecca,
Yes, indeed. Anything that is deleted, regardless of what client is used, should be put into their trash. If the folders were deleted they should definitely show up in the Amazon trash. If they were deleted with odrive they would first appear in the odrive “trash”, and held there until emptied. Once the odrive trash was emptied, the files would then show up in the Amazon trash. At that point, odrive loses track of those files/folders since they are moved beyond odrive’s view of your data. odrive doesn’t touch the Amazon trash (Amazon doesn’t even offer an API to permanently delete things out of their trash).
The fact that you have other content in the Amazon trash, but not these folders is even more perplexing, because it means you would’ve had to explicitly delete these items out of the Amazon trash, but is sound like you most definitely did not.
The next step here may be to reach out to Amazon Drive about this and see what they can see on their side. I will send you some information over PM regarding the IDs of these folder, so that they can pinpoint the objects we are talking about.
Hi Tony,
Thanks! I also replied via PM.
Thanks Rebecca! Just let me know how I can help.