I’m new to this so I may have missed previous posts, but what about indexing files that are on some cloud drive and unsynced on your local computer, that is, locally you only see placeholders?
File Explorer searches don’t work, presumably because that program sees only the empty placeholders apparently without content.
Is there any way to index unsynced files by their file name?
Hi @natandmark2,
You should be able to index and search for placeholder files by name, just as you do for any normal files. If you have unsynced folders, however, you would not be able to index the contents of those folders unless the were expanded first.
Can you provide some more details on what you are seeing?
On a desktop computer my files are synced via odrive to my amazon cloud setup, so files are also available locally. I can index them via Microsoft File Explorer just fine.
On a second laptop computer I have my amazon cloud unsynced, so the files are only available online. On that setup File Explorer sees just the placeholders, and nothing is indexed. For example, if I type in the letter “e” in File Explorer search it shows no files matching that name!
I’m not sure I understand what you mean my expanding the contents of folders first – the files on my amazon cloud drive would not fit on my laptop, which is sort of the point of using the cloud drive.
THanks,
Mark
Hi @natandmark2,
Thanks for the follow-up.
You can expand folders and still have the files inside take up no space, using placeholders. Windows File Explorer should pick up placeholder files the same as any other files.
For example, in this screenshot I did a search for ‘copy’ in my odrive folder. My odrive folder doesn’t have any non-placeholder files in it at the moment.
How do you expand placeholders and yet have them take up no space on your local drive?
Mark
Hi @natandmark2,
You can expand the folders. Double-clicking on a placeholder that represents a folder will expand it, exposing the content inside as placeholders. You can do this for a whole structure with a right-click->sync on the folder you want to expand and sliding the slider all the way to the left for “Nothing”, clicking on the “Include Subfolders” checkbox, and then clicking on the big silver sync button.
I was under the impression that if you click on sync and then click on the big silver button that you will be syncing, that is downloading, all your files to the local computer you’re working on.
Hi @natandmark2,
It will only download files that are above the threshold set. If you set that threshold to ‘nothing’ then all files are put down as 0-byte placeholders.
Yes, in fact that works just fine – with this the search feature of File Manager works just fine. That, along with using the right click “open with” feature to open a .cloudf file in a program, does everything I want!
If I could make an observation about Odrive, it seems like a very powerful program that has lots of useful capabilities. But it took me a long time to figure out how to make it do the specific things I wanted, and I did read the manual pretty carefully, I thought.
It might be useful to put together some specific examples of how people might want to use it and then walk through exactly how you would do that.
For example, in my case I want it for backing up my main desktop computer and also for using it as a purely cloud drive for my laptop which has too little memory for all the files to be stored locally.
Somebody else might want it more just for cloud backup.
But in any case, some examples of how to implement the program for such specific cases could be very helpful for new users.
Thanks,
Mark
Hi @natandmark2,
Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad you were able to get things dialed in the way you want.
The next generation of odrive is going to have a more robust interface that will make things easier to configure and understand for the popular use cases (backup, sync, import, export, etc), along with updated documentation and examples.
