Just trying to figure things out here and got myself a bit confused.
Here’s the situation:
I have a iMac at home, with a smallish main SSD boot drive (on which the main odrive folder resides) and few external HDDs attached to it. On the external drives are music libraries, sound effects libraries and various files that I want to sync to the cloud (Amazon Cloud Drive).
I want access to these files (on an ad hoc basis) whilst I’m on the road with my Macbook Pro.
I’m a premium member and I’ve synced the files on the external drives to the cloud. (I made a folder in odrive with the name of the external HDD and chose that for the sync location)
Questions:
Will there be file duplication on my iMac SSD drive (or do I just leave the files as placeholders)
I recently checked and it seems the local files on my external HDD has disappeared (although they are uploaded into the cloud) but have just appeared as placeholders in the main odrive folder (on my SSD which doesn’t have the space to host the files locally). Is this supposed to happen? I don’t think so right? I’m thinking the premium feature would just allow me essentially to have synced folders outside of the main odrive folder without affecting the local files?
I believe you have a machine (iMac) with external HDD mounted to Amazon Cloud Drive using odrive “Sync to odrive” feature and another machine login with the same odrive account (Macbook Pro).
In this scenario, odrive folder in both of your machines will show similar contents including files synced from your external HDD to Amazon Cloud Drive since all data is synced between your desktop and the storage. You don’t need to worry about the disk space problem because you can unsync your files anytime in any of the your machine, particularly in iMAC, to re-claim the disk space. Placeholder files won’t occupy any space in your SSD. I would suggest you to leave the files in placeholder state in your iMAC SSD drive (if not needed).
Would you please elaborate “It seems the local files on my external HDD has disappeared” in more details, this sounds unexpected since file shouldn’t be removed from your external HDD after upload until deleted from your odrive folder, HDD or storage (manually).
The odrive folder will give you access to everything, including folders used for syncing external folders. You should leave them as placeholders on your iMac since you already have the files in the original location (external drive). This will not consume any additional disk space. You can sync and unsync from your Macbook Pro without affecting your iMac setup.
I have the same concern as Asif. To clarify, are the files still on your external HDD? How are the external HDDs connected? Do you see placeholders in the external HDD? Do you have auto unsync enabled?
Yes the original files have disappeared off my external drive. I suspect it was possibly because I recently had an issue with odrive and had to remove and reinstall the desktop sync app. But still, the files are originally on my external drive and are ‘native’ to it, they shouldn’t disappear just because odrive was removed/reinstalled right?
I’ve now re-copied the files to the external drive and done the whole ‘sync to odrive’ thing again so its ok now, but I fear that the next time I have a problem with odrive and have to reinstall, the files might disappear again.