I was moving everything to googledrive and now see there are other people with issues. The whole foldering system is there but the actual documents and files are missing. They have the omega symbol at the front of the file name. Google couldn’t help and they are not in the trash. Google only saves in the trash for 30 days and these were moved in March and May.
Can you help me? I spent tons of time moving dropbox, local, onedrive, and google drive files all around to clean everything up and now it looks like those things never actually made it there.
It sounds like you wanted to move data from other cloud providers into Google Drive. Can you walk me through the steps you took?
odrive can’t move data directly between clouds, so you can’t move or copy placeholder files from one cloud storage to another. As long as you had downloaded the items you were moving locally, first, odrive will upload those items to wherever you placed them.
Can you provide a screenshot of what you are seeing? You might be seeing placeholder files with the infinity symbol as an icon?
Thanks for responding. Yes, I was wanting to move from all the clouds to Google Drive. Seemed your offering was the way to move that happen. And, this section of files where actually all on my desktop. Am I right in understanding that anything that would want to move between clouds would have to be downloaded first to my computer and then uploaded? I thought this was automated to do that.
You have this correct and my sincere apologies for the confusion this caused.
odrive’s main “philosophy” is that you don’t need to move data between clouds because odrive can give you access to everything, no matter where it is located, from a single local folder. Of course, I absolutely understand the desire to get everything you have in multiple remote storages consolidated into a single remote storage. odrive just wasn’t built for that purpose.
If odrive is able to, it will actually move folders back to where they were if a folder that still contains placeholders files (.cloud and .cloudf) is moved from one storage to another. It isn’t able to do this on a copy because it can’t tell where the data came from, so it just ends up seeing “invalid” placeholder files that it can’t do anything with.
You can still facilitate migration or duplication from one remote storage cloud to another with odrive, but you will need to download the data from one storage before copying or moving it the other storage.
The Ω character you see may be unrelated. Often folks will use this character to force a folder to be listed last (when sorted alphabetically). Is it possible it was used for that?
Otherwise I don’t know why these folders would have this character on them. odrive won’t do something like this.
I am painfully aware that all of the junk above doesn’t help you with your main issue of not having the files in Google that you thought you did. I wish there was more I could do to help.
I am already talking with the product team to see how we can better inform users of the requirement of having files downloaded before moving them to other storages. We should be able to pop-up a message if an invalid placeholder file is discovered and log that out to the sync activity log so that users can have a better chance of understanding and correcting the issue.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to assist you.
This is a very kind response. And, I need to sit and process what that means and how to proceed. The omega sign was not placed by me and I’m the only one working with these files and it is everywhere.
As for a pop up, I think something needs to written to explicitly in many places to explain what ODrive can and can not do. say that odrive lets you access multiple locations but you can not move between them and then lock that functionality. I’m not sure why I was able to copy and paste and clean up all my filing system. What’s the point of letting me do that?
As for newly created files, I thought the whole benefit was that then I could also save from my laptop into those places because it mapped to those folders. Does that mean that none of what I thought I was saving to those places got saved either? Or did those because they started on my computer?
How do I proceed? Stop using oDrive all together? Back up all the other places to a different cloud provider and just deal with the fact that similar things are saved in multiple places and have many duplicates?
I’m glad I checked this before I decided to wipe out all my duplicates.
Hi @nicole,
Thanks for getting back to me. I can certainly work with you to figure out the best way forward.
I’d like to investigate this more to see what caused this. It is something I never seen outside of it being done deliberately.
I can say for certain that odrive didn’t add that character. I even went so far as to check the code and there isn’t a single instance of that character (or its encoded equivalent) anywhere in our codebase. Examining the sync activity logs may help us to figure out what happened there. More on that later.
Unfortunately this isn’t something odrive can block. odrive is mostly observing activity on the local and remote sides and then reacting to those changes to bring everything into sync. That is a bit of an oversimplification, but it doesn’t have any agency in filesystem operations, so it can’t prevent actions. It can try to reverse them if it has enough information to do that. This is why it will try to reverse a move operation that contains placeholders if it detects the move is crossing storage clouds. This isn’t possible with copy operations, though.
That being the case, we are already working on adding notifications for when unknown placeholder are detected and will also be ensuring that this information is better highlighted in our documentation.
Any files/folders that are not placeholders will always upload automatically. You can even move placeholders around within the same storage and that will produce the desired effect on the remote storage. The issue is only with placeholder files that are copied or placeholder files that are moved across storage.
I’ll send you a direct message so that we can discuss the specifics of what you want to do and how best to proceed. Can you send a diagnostic from the odrive tray menu, to start, so I can take a look at the current configuration?
I finally went back to the computer because I need to move my files off and was reminded that I can’t see any of the actual documents in google drive. I can only see the folders. What do I do?
Hi @nicole,
It is good to hear from you! It has been a while.
The conclusion we came to previously was that the reorganization that you performed was done with placeholder files because the “real” files hadn’t been downloaded before the files were copied over to Google Drive.
At the time it sounded like you still had all of that data duplicated elsewhere, so you were still able to access that data in the original locations.
If you still wanted to copy the data from other storage into Google Storage, you would just need to make sure you are copying the “real” files instead of placeholders (download the files to your local computer first, before copying/moving them to Google Drive).
Just let me know if you have any questions about this!
I guess I thought that was the point of odrive to be able to move things between places. So every file needs to be downloaded to my computer first and then moved to google drive? So me mapping them from place to place was not enough. I would need to go back in and move every file one by one to the end destination?
Right now I have some of this on my external harddrive but they are not in the folders set up the right way I did with o drive and some of it is in different places, I was organizing between dropbox, my computer, and google drive.
So I need to go file by file and put them on the laptop first and then move them to where they go? How does o drive help then? I thought you made it faster or easier:).
Best practice is to make sure you’ve downloaded any files from the remote storage to the local storage before copying/moving them around. That can be done with a right-click->sync command on the folder or files you want to copy.
If you have “real” data (vs odrive placeholders) on your external drive and want to get that data into Google Drive or Dropbox you can either:
Just copy it directly to the locations where you want it to be and odrive will upload that copied data.
You can use the “sync to odrive” feature to directly map those folders to locations in Dropbox or Google Drive, which will create an ongoing sync relationship to upload anything in the chosen location on the external drive to the chosen location on the remote storage.
For the “sync to odrive” method, the process would looks something like this:
Organize the data on your external drive in the way that you want, if that has not already been done.
Right-click on a folder on the external drive and select “sync to odrive”. This will open-up a browser window to select the destination that you want this folder to sync to.
If the local folder name matches the remote folder name selected, the relationship will be created between those two locations and all of the local files will be automatically uploaded to the remote storage.
If the remote folder selected has a different name than the local folder, a new folder will be created in the remote location, the sync relationship will be created between the local and the new remote folder, and everything in the local folder will upload.
I’m not sure I am answering your questions fully, so please let me know if you have any questions!
