Google drive folder is only 63GB but local Odrive folder is 200+GB

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

There seems to be a problem with sync Odrive on Mac to Google Drive.
Local Odrive contains duplicates of files and keeps shared with me files.

My Google Drive folder is 63GB
My Odrive folder is 208GB including the sub folder “Shared with Me”

Please advise.

2

Hi @georgiev.vela,
How are you determining the size of the Google Drive folder? Is this as viewed from the web client?

Can you send a diagnostic from the odrive menu and provide a few paths on the local system that you feel should not be there?

3

Google Drive size as viewed by web client

Diagnostics was already sent

‎⁨Macintosh HD⁩ ▸ ⁨Users⁩ ▸ ⁨georgiev⁩ ▸ ⁨odrive⁩ ▸ ⁨Google Drive - _HardworX⁩ ▸ ⁨Shared with Me⁩⁩ ▸ ⁨HWX SZ18 Workshop #2 - presentation - WIP

4

Hi @georgiev.vela,
Shared items can take up space on your computer, if they are downloaded, but they won’t take up your space on Google Drive (only the Google Drive user who owns the files will see these as taking up Space on their Google Drive). Could this be the discrepancy you are seeing?

If you don’t want those items to take up space locally, you can unsync them.

5

I think what he is saying is folders that are “shared with me” are duplicated. I can verify that is the case. Once directly in the root of the service and then again under a folder called shared with me.

I will see if this is an issue with gsuite for business instead of across the board.

I will say however there are some MASSIVE google bugs with gsuite and “Shared with me”

6

OK, I did a bit of testing. This occurs when the shared folder is added to my drive.
there is a menu option for that… Hopefully it shows up below.

The Drive sync from google will only sync these shared folders IF they are added to my drive. All it does is create a pointer.

What you may want to do is create an option to mimic this behavior. It should not be to hard as you are making a different set of API calls to get those files

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7

Thanks @chip!

In this case we are requesting a list of files from the root of the user’s drive. Google returns in this listing the files the user has chosen to “add to My Drive”. For the file under “Shared With Me”, we are explicitly requesting Shared files.

If an odrive desktop user has synced both the shared files in the root and the same shared files in the “Shared With Me” folder, then there will be redundancy on the local side. In this case it is best to not sync down the files in “Shared With Me”, or unsync them if they have already been synced to remove the redundancy.

8

@Tony I will say that I WISH the google sync client worked that way originally. The fact that sync did NOT sync the shared with me folders was a big cause of confusion. Of course then when someone comes along and does it correctly it can cause confusion. So exactly with what you are saying you may want to add a setting to NOT request shared files and only bring back Root listings. This way it could mimic the operation of the Google app.

For those of you who read this and are looking for a solution be aware that Selecting REMOVE a shared with Me in the gdrive web interface UNDER My Drive DOES NOT remove the share. It is still shared with you under the Shared with me folder.

9

Sorry, @Tony I meant a user defined in the above.

10

So can I have some clear instructions and help on what to in my specific case please?

11

Hi @georgiev.vela,
This answer will depend on what you want to see locally.

To summarize the behavior:

  • All items shared with you will show up under the “Shared With Me” folder, like they do from the Google Drive web client.
  • From the Google Drive webclient, if you right-click on an item in your “Shared With Me” folder, you can select the option “Add to My Drive” to have that item show up in the root of your Google Drive. When this is done you will now see that item in both the root of your Google Drive and under “Shared With Me”. This behavior is mirrored on the odrive desktop client.
  • Since the odrive desktop client will show these types of items in both places, it is possible to sync them both and have redundant local storage.

If you want to prevent the redundant local storage you can perform one of the following actions:

  • Remove the shared item from your Google Drive root, as @chip mentioned above. To do this, you will go to the Google Drive web client, right-click on the shared item in the root that you want to remove, and select “Remove”. This item will be removed from the root listing, but still be available under “Shared With Me”
  • Use odrive to right-click->unsync the item in the root of your Google Drive. This will replace the file or folder with a placeholder file, removing the local storage allocation from that location.
  • Use odrive to right-click->unsync the item in the “Shared With Me” folder. This will replace the file or folder with a placeholder file, removing the local storage allocation from that location.
12

Hi @chip,
I took a look at this. It may be possible, although the filtering in Google Drive to accomplish this is a bit vague. There isn’t a flag to remove the shared items from the listing, but we may be able to filter by owner (only show files owned by you), which could result in the root listing excluding the Shared items.

This would need to be tested and developed, so I can’t say it will be added in, but I have presented the information to the product team.

1 Like
13

hey, @Tony I thought that my drive and team folders were to separate API calls to get the data. It may not be anymore.

14

Hi @chip,
You do get the teamdrives listing from a specific “teamdrives” endpoint, but the “Shared With Me” items are separate from that, and obtained from the main “files” endpoint with a filter for “sharedWithMe” items.

It is possible I may not fully understand your scenario, however, and I’m missing something.