Is there a way to disable placeholder files with size (sparse files)?

I Have a Question
1

Jeff, is there any way to disable the remote-file size being shown via the .cloud file? When Dropbox did that, they completely screwed up things like other backup systems. I couldn’t do a disk restore because the computed disk size (which was way larger than the physical disk because of these placeholder-for-remote-files directory entries) was flagged as “too large,” even though there was plenty of room. The source disk was effectively bricked because I couldn’t make a copy of it. Frankly, it was this behavior that drove me to oDrive and the thought of oDrive going down the same path doesn’t fill me with confidence. These sorts of games with directory entries cause lots of havoc, and for me at least, provide absolutely no benefit.

2

Hi @allen,
We included an option to disable this feature in the advanced config file odrive_user_general_conf.txt

The option is set by default to:
"disableSparse": false,

You can change it to:
"disableSparse": true,

You may not see this option in your current configs. If not, you can either just add it yourself to the top like this:

{
    "disableSparse": true,
    "disableFSEvents": false, 
    "ignoreSizeMismatch": false, 
    "localScanIntervalSecs": 3600, 
    "maxDownloadRetries": 3, 
    "preventOldDownload": false, 
    "suppressTrashNotifications": false
}

Or you can delete the current odrive_user_general_conf.txt and restart odrive to create a new file with all of the default configs.

In either case, you will need to restart odrive after the change for it to take effect.

3

For backup considerations: Since odrive still uses the same placeholder file extensions (.cloud and .cloudf), you should be able to exclude these file types in your backup configuration, ensuring that the backup will not include any placeholders, sparse or not.