I have a folder that is pretty large with files that is synced to odrive, how should I move this entire folder to my other hard drive without having to waste half a week letting it re-upload everything?
Thank you for any help!
Copy your files to the other hard drive, then just right click on the odrive system tray icon and move the folder to where they new folders are. It should work without re-uploading.
I think there are a few methods that should work here. The method that @JamesGTRS mentioned is one of them.
Here are a couple ways to do this:
A. The “move your odrive folder to the new data” method This is what @JamesGTRS mentioned.
- Make sure odrive is idle and everything currently in odrive has been uploaded to the cloud already.
- Copy (do not move) the entire odrive folder to the new location
- Wait for copying to complete
- Select “Move odrive folder” from the odrive tray menu
- Select the new “odrive” folder in its new location.
- After things have settled, restart odrive
B. The “find your missing odrive folder” technique
- Make sure odrive is idle and everything currently in odrive has been uploaded to the cloud already.
- While odrive is running, rename the current “odrive” folder to something like “odrive-moving”.
- When you now look at the odrive tray menu, you will see that odrive now shows “[missing]” next to the “Open odrive folder” option.
While in this state, odrive will wait for you to correct the “missing” folder. - Move or copy the “odrive-moving” folder to your new location.
- Once it is done copying/moving, rename the new “odrive-moving” folder back to “odrive” This is important, because odrive needs the folder to be named “odrive” when it tries to find it again
- Click on the “Open odrive folder [missing]” option in the odrive tray menu and then click on “Find missing folder” This will open up a folder picker that allows you to “find” the missing odrive folder. Navigate to the new location and select that new “odrive” folder.
- After things have settled, restart odrive
In all cases, make sure the new odrive folder is named “odrive”. That is how odrive identifies its folder, and the name is a requirement. If you point odrive to a location that doesn’t have an “odrive” folder already, it will create its own and you will be starting from scratch.
Method A. is probably the more straightforward/recommended method for you. I listed method B. just in case any future folks need to move their data instead of copy. For example, if they are moving to another location on the same disk and don’t have enough free space to make a second copy of the data.
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These methods are helpful, however I believe the question referred to a folder synced to odrive, rather than the whole odrive folder itself. What would the best methods be in this case?
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Good catch @jgallant1990. I think you are right.
Moving a “sync to odrive” folder is actually easier. In general odrive tries to prevent duplicate uploads and does a pretty good job of it. I always recommend trying with a smaller subset of data, just to make sure the results are what you expect, but here is the general procedure for moving a “sync to odrive” folder:
- Right-click->“Remove sync” on the folder
- Copy (I always recommend copy rather than move if it is at all possilbe) the data to the new destination folder. Make sure the destination folder has the same name as the original folder. This will make things much simpler.
- Right-click->“Sync to odrive” on the new folder
- Select the exact same remote destination as you had for the original folder
After step 4, odrive will scan the new folder and start merging the content with the destination. If there were no changes made between the time to took to perform the above steps, everything should be marked as in sync without any re-upload.
Again, I always recommend trying with a smaller subset of data (a test “sync to odrive folder” with some test data in it) since every integration is a little different and its good to test the results before moving a massive structure.
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