Moving items from old odrive folder to new location

According to the docs, when you select a new location for the odrive folder the previous odrive folder is left behind and the items in it are no longer monitored or synchronized by odrive.

  • The docs don’t specify, but I assume that this means the new folder will contains no synchronized items.
  • From this “fresh” state, do all items have to be resynchronized?
  • Can previously synchronized items be manually moved from the old location to the new location without breaking odrive?

Hi @nathan.farrar,

That is correct. The odrive folder will look as it did when you first set it up. All links inside will be .cloudf placeholders.

Anything you want locally would need to be reconciled/synced somehow

You should be able to move your previous folder contents into the new folder and odrive will reconcile the files without re-uploading. The basic steps would be:

  1. Make sure everything is in sync in your current location, so you are not interrupting any sync processes and everything is already safely in the cloud
  2. Use the “Move odrive folder” option in the odrive menu to move your odrive folder to a new location. It will be created there with all placeholders.
  3. Leave the new odrive folder just how it is. Select all of the items inside the old odrive folder and move/copy them into the new odrive folder, confirming replacement, if prompted.

It will take some time for odrive to go through everything, but you should start seeing items green-badged as odrive scans through the structure and reconciles all of the items.

I have the same question, did the proposed actions work?

They should work. I have done the same myself, many times.

Hi,
I just searched related issue and found this year 2017 thread, not sure if it is proper to bring this thread alive.

Anyway, I did not know that user can use odrive in this way, my previous understanding is to leave the old folder where it is and delete old folder at proper/chosen time. For new folder, just setting new and preferred download items.

Is there something I should know in order to prevent an odrive data problem here? Or both ways work?

Hi @benjaminxyang,
The old folder is just a backup, so you can do whatever you want with it. odrive doesn’t even know about it.

In the above case, the user wanted to move the odrive folder to a new location and didn’t want to re-download files that had already been downloaded, so they wanted to move the items from the backup to the new folder.

This is the fourth time that I checked in and read the quoted. I never did that before and kind of getting nervous to try, I am imagining the old and new will be messed up… maybe I will try it sometime. Thanks for your reply.

Hi @benjaminxyang,
If you are nervous about it, you can try a limited test with just a folder or two and make sure it behaves the way you expect. I do not expect you will have any issues.