Hi odrive team,
So after almost a year of agony since Copy closed itself down, I’m still struggling to find a sync client that really work. I have tried odrive in the past but there was a lot of limitation .
Now that the product seem almost fully matured, I’m going back to see how it work for myself and see if It can benefit my workplace (since we are allowed to use different cloud services of our own choice). But the external folder feature still seem pretty confusing, so please bear with my lengthy explanation and help me clear up a bit.
First of, Let’s throw the old rotten idea of “one folder keep all” that Dropbox founder spreaded out of the question, It’s old and unorganized - and only really work for people who have no more than a handful of folder and one single drive to be synced between one or two machine, as far as I know.
The scenario is that we have some folders spread across our laptop, server, PC. Some of them are already in Dropbox, GGDrice or Amazon Cloud, some are not. Some are shared between teams and we each want to keep our local copy at wherever we want, not inside anything
**1. **
For the ones that are not in any cloud at all, when chosing “sync to odrive”, I see that a place holder is created inside odrive. File creation and modification in the original folder seem to be updated just fine (though delete operation take ages to be processed even after emptying the trash bin). Creation that occur inside here are populated back to the original folder which is great. BUT, If I ever accidentally tried to access the placeholder folder inside odrive, another copy is downloaded inside there depend on the auto download setting .
This doesn’t seem to make sense since I still have my original files outside - without the need for another copy. Please help me elaborate on this.
**2. **
For the ones that are already in one of our cloud service, I’m confused with what to do to make odrive start it comparision process, since odrive already please tons of place holder in the respective cloud folder.
Back in the day with Copy, I just need to stop the sync client - link all necessary external folder inside Copy folder - start it again and go get a cup of tea. 50000+ files can be processed this way in a couple hours if we ever need to reinstall the sync client or move cloud (using mover.io beforehand) without having to upload/download anything at all.
Please help me check if there is anyway to make odrive work this way or not (since I’m not sure if I can remove the cloud place holder then click “send” the local folder inside). Insync claim to support this, but after some troubleshooting it turned out they do not work well if folders already exited on both side when the client first setup itself and I have to request a refund.
I do understand that users and developers has different opinions regarding how we should follow links, and it does difficult to implement & maintain symlink support across platforms - which is why this “Sync to” feature that odrive manage to implemented seem like a great approach. At this point, regardless of my team’s opinion, I personally are ready to pay a sync client that really “work” twice or even three time more than we pay the cloud service itself, since none of the Google, Mega or Dropbox’s client ever managed to work in the sense of “setup and forget” like Copy did.
But the placeholder really are in the ways of people who want to keep things under control locally instead of relying too much on the network connection. So I’d appreciate if you can help me clear things up a little bit.