I have multiple duplicates of the same file in google drive thanks to oDrive, i’m now over the limit and google drive won’t let me save anything more. How do i de-duplicate all these files?
Hi @brandon.welch26,
odrive doesn’t have a way to dedupe duplicate files in Google storage. odrive will actually only show the most recent version of a file, if there are multiple files with the name name in the folder. It does this because it is not possible to write multiple files with the same name to the local filesystem.
Are the duplicate files distributed in multiple folders, or are the duplicates in the same folders? Clicking on the “i” icon at the top right of the Google Drive web client will reveal a side-pane with information on the selected file, so you can determine where it is. It will also show when it was created and by whom/what.
It is surprising that odrive would be responsible for these duplicates since it will explicitly use an “update” API call when updating a file that already exists. Can you provide some additional information about some of these duplicates so the Engineering team can look into this and make sure we are accounting for all scenarios? Are you able to reproduce this behavior?
this has happened to me before when my account was disabled for non-payment (company card expires and i don’t know until sync isn’t working). When i re-enanbled odrive a few weeks ago my drive doubled in size overnight. I’m pretty sure i was at 10-15 GB then it doubled after the re-sync. I’m also afraid of deleting or reorganizing the folders bc odrive removes the actual file with a link and if i reorganize my folders on my computer it breaks all the links to google drive (i’ve made that mistake and lost important files).
Hi @brandon.welch26,
Are you able to determine if the files with duplicates reside in the same folder, or in different folders? Are they spread around? Depending on the length of time that odrive was not syncing, its possible that items had moved around prior to re-engaging sync, which then uploaded copies to new locations.
Is this with google doc type files (gdocx, gsheetx, etc.)? There was an issue a while ago where moving or modifying google doc files could end up causing issues with them on the google side, but we now prevent any modification to those files via the odrive desktop client.
Here’s an example of an issue i’m seeing. I have thousands of copies of this file. This is more than a simple copy and move to a different directory.
Hi @brandon.welch26,
Thanks for the screenshot. This is interesting. These look like some form of conflict files, but not from odrive. odrive creates conflict files by adding “(conflict)” to the file name. odrive also uses “.gdocx” for the google docs file extension, instead of just “.gdoc”.
I believe Google’s own client uses the “.gdoc” extension, and I am going to suggest to our product team that we consider treating these files the same way as our own Google Docs files to ensure they they cannot be manipulated, just in case that could be happening here.
Can you select a few of those files and click on the information icon to get more information about them?
You will see something like this:
It would help to know where these files are located, when they were uploaded, and by whom/what.
Are you using any other clients in addition to odrive for managing/syncing your Google Drive on any of your computers?