Hi,
Time after time I keep encountering various flavors of a situation when I have a local copy of a file set on the cloud and yet I’m having a hard time “convincing” odrive to just accept the files “as is” when I copy them into the local odrive directory rather than uploading the exact same contents back to the storage, wasting days of my time and hundreds of gigabytes of upload traffic.
Following are a few scenarios in which I’ve recently faced this problem:
- I was moving from Amazon drive to OneDrive. On my home computer I copied the files from odrive\amazon to odrive\onedrive and eventually the contents were uploaded to the OneDrive cloud storage. I then tried to do the same on work PC. I would expect that the moment the files have been copied to odrive\onedrive, odrive would recognize the local files as matching the ones in the cloud storage. This was indeed the case with most of the files, but roughly one third of them were erroneously deemed different and it took my work PC days to finish the unnecessary upload of the files to the storage,
- I’ve also had a Dropbox storage for quite a while, controlled by Dropbox’s native client. A few days ago I decided to let odrive handle this storage for me. So I uninstalled the Dropbox client, linked my Dropbox storage to my odrive account, opened the local odrive\dropbox.cloudf directory and moved there the whole contents from the Dropbox directory. Again, for no obvious reason some of the files (maybe just 10-15% of them, but it’s still over 100GB of data) were not recognized as matching the cloud storage and my PC started uploading them back to the cloud
- Every now and then I download some fresh 4K footage from my Phantom drone (normally ~20 GB each time) to my local directory and let odrive upload them to the storage. But on my other PCs I would rather avoid downloading the files from the cloud by copying the new files manually to them. And again, in some cases it works and in some it doesn’t.
Responding to my concerns @Tony has written a couple of detailed posts containing hints as to how to get the best possible odds at having odrive recognize the files as similar. But it still only works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t (at least for me). So even after trying all the tricks @Tony suggested I still find myself with a huge amount of files that will have to be uploaded or downloaded in order to be considered the same as in the storage, even though they already ARE the same and I know it for a fact.
What I’m suggesting is some form of an import wizard that would entrust the user with the critical decision making if an uncertainty arises. Such wizard would first let you point to a set of files outside the odrive local directory and specify the target directory under odrive. It would then perform the comparison between the local files and the storage, display the results and let you decide how to resolve potential conflicts. The options might include:
- Ignoring any minor attribute mismatches (as long as the size is the same), keeping both the local and the cloud copy as is and marking the local copy as synced with the blue check mark badge
- Choosing to upload the local copy to the cloud
- Choosing to download the storage copy
Thanks,
Alexey