How do I point duplicate odrive subfolder to original?

Before getting odrive I had already uploaded a large media folder to Amazon Cloud Drive. After installing odrive I now appear to have duplicate folders; one of them is a subfolder of odrive. How do I point this new odrive folder to the original folder so that it uploads new content? Surely I’m not expected to move the original folder into the odrive folder. If so, I assume this means uploading the enormous volume of content again. Doesn’t make sense.

I’m using a Mac.

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You have three choices

  1. Save your disk space and delete the large media that is already in Amazon. When you need the files, browse the media folder from odrive and use placeholders to only sync the fils you need.

  2. If you want to keep a full local copy, drag the large media folder into the odrive amazon folder. odrive will see the new files are duplicates and sync without uploading.

  3. Don’t do anything. If the media files are static, there is no need to sync. Leave the large media folder where it lives on your hard drive and don’t open the media folder in your odrive amazon folder. odrive will not sync down those files unless you ask for it.

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Thanks for the response, Peter.

Yes, I do want to keep a local copy. The cloud storage is meant to be a backup, and it does change regularly.

So I need to now create a process that will automatically sync the odrive folder to my local folder? If so, it hasn’t solved my problem of auto-syncing; I may as well create a process that will automatically kick off the Amazon Cloud Drive synchronization and skip the odrive step altogether, no?

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So I’m a whopping few hours into odrive and wondering the same thing as Oliver. In order to keep a local copy in its original location, if I understand what I’m readying correctly, then you would right click on the folder in your local storage and select oo Sync. odrive asks where you would like to store this folder via its web browser. Is that what odrive recommends?

In my case, I already uploaded our 600+ GB of photos to our Amazon Drive account. So I clicked the Pictures folder on my external hard drive and odrive opened my browser to ask where I wanted to Sync it. I selected the Pictures folder on Amazon Drive where the photos already are, and ensured the address line above the selection area read /AmazonDrive/Pictures as it should. And voila! Within seconds (like <10) it recognized 87 of the 89 items were already synced and started uploaded changes to the remaining two folders.

I’m impressed. If this continues to be this easy and straightforward, then I’ll be one of those 1:1,000,000 who gives up three drinks at Starbucks each month for all the headaches this saves.

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Hi Chris,
You’ve got the right idea. With “sync to odrive” we will try to detect what files are already in the Amazon Drive target folder (or wherever you are pointing to) to eliminate duplicate upload effort. Glad to hear you’ve got things working!

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Hi @oliverwatson,
I missed your question previously, but were you able to set things up the way you wanted?

The ideal way to keep a previously-existing local folder in-sync with a location in the cloud is to use the “sync to odrive” feature:

This will keep everything in sync, automatically, in both directions. It will also attempt to determine what has already been uploaded to to that location and skip uploading again.

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