I’m new and a little lost in terms of the whole “cloud sync” thing. I understand that I can download what I want from the cloud and vice versa, but I’m not really sure how to “update” things in the cloud with what I’ve changed on my main SSD (local). The thing is that I’m using odrive mainly as a backup for what’s on my harddrive (plus some extra photos kept on old CDs). I’ll very rarely need to download anything from the cloud onto my desktop, unless my local drives fail (which is the point of having amazon cloud and odrive in the first place!).
When I had premium, it was easy to just sync a file with everything included, and it would automatically update any changes. But now that I’m on the free version, I don’t understand how to update my files that are on the cloud. I drag the main folder into my odrive folder on my local system and it seems like it’s saving actual copies of everything that take up disc space. When I try to upload the main folder into the odrive online client, it completely ignores the folder system that I have.
So my questions are, how do I get my changes uploaded into the cloud, and how do I make sure that I’m not accidentally taking up space on my local drives?
Hi @jade-soleil,
Can you tell me how you had odrive setup during the trial? Were you syncing to an external volume?
If so, then dragging files from an external volume to odrive will make copies in the local odrive folder.
Some basics:
When you first setup odrive you are given an “odrive” folder in your home directory. Inside that “odrive” folder you will see placeholders representing all of the storage you have linked. You can link as many storage accounts as you want and have them show up in this “odrive” folder. Take a look at our documentation here for an in-depth walkthrough of the odrive folder:
That is all part of the free odrive usage.
There is another feature that is more advanced that lets you sync other, existing folders to a location in odrive. Using this feature you create a sync relationship between a local folder and a remote location in your odrive. These are folders that are not inside the “odrive” folder. This is what it sounds like you were using. You can read more about this here:
If you are using the latter feature then this would stop working once the Premium trial expired and you would need to switch to using the first method for sync.
Keep in mind that we offer a no-questions-asked, full refund if you cancel your Premium subscription within 30 days of purchase, which means you can continue evaluating odrive, risk-free, for an additional 30 days to see if the Premium features might still be right for you.
Hello Tony
Thanks for the response. I guess what is confusing me then is that some of my files in my odrive directory on my local machine show up as.cloud files, while others don’t. They have the little blue checkmark, but still appear to take up space. I don’t know how to make those files that are not .cloud files go back to being .cloud files. Thanks!
Edit: to answer your first question…I have 3 discs on my computer, 2hdds and 1 ssd. The files I’m changing are on one of my hdds. The drive directory is located on my ssd, which is also my OS drive. So maybe that is the problem.
Hi @jade-soleil,
.cloud files represent the files you have stored in your cloud storage, but are not “cached” locally (meaning the content of those files is not local or taking up space). You can convert any synced, locally cached files in your odrive folders to .cloud files with a right-click->unsync