I just installed odrive to back up some of my data to OneDrive for Business. I right-clicked some folders on my computer and selected them to sync to a new folder in my OneDrive for Business. It started syncing and looked good, and I saw some files and folders come up on the “Not Allowed” section of the odrive application. When I clicked the items to see why these normal files and folders were “Not Allowed” it just said “Doesn’t exist in OneDrive for Business.” The only option was to “Remove Changes” or something so I did this and it was removed from the “Not Allowed” list. When I checked back to the folders on my computer I wanted to sync, all of my files are now missing. They are not in the recycle bin, and I’m currently running a deep scan on Recuva to try and recover these files. Of course I selected my most important files to sync into OneDrive and now they’re gone! Your software has just created the disaster I was trying to protect myself against by syncing my data to the cloud.
Hi @matt4,
I am sincerely sorry to hear that this happened.
I have been trying to reproduce this to understand the scenario and see what we can add to prevent this from happening in the future.
It sounds like this is the dialog you saw:
I was able to generate this by removing the sync destination folder while odrive was trying to sync the new file (test.file in this case). The “Item does not exists” error here is generated when the file/folder sync is attempted and OneDrive doesn’t allow the upload and returns a 404 response, which means “Not found”. In my test this was because the folder odrive was attempting to upload the file to didn’t exist anymore.
When the “Delete your change” button is hit, odrive tells Windows to move that file to the Windows Recycle bin.
Unfortunately, there are cases where Windows will not move files to the Recycle bin when asked, and instead just delete them. This can happen if the drive that the files are on doesn’t have the Recycle Bin ability (a network drive, for example). This can also happen if the Recycle Bin settings have been changed to always immediately delete files, or if the size of the data that is deleted is larger than the limit on the Recycle Bin (usually 5% of the total storage, by default).
Losing data is the number one thing we want to avoid, so I am continuing to look at this to see what we can do to improve this interaction. I have already submitted a change request to adjust the text from “Delete your change” to “Delete this file/folder” to add some additional clarity to what that action entails. I am also inquiring if we can remove the option to delete, entirely, and instead open up Explorer to the file/folder location.
Again, I am very sorry that this happened and I will continue looking at this to see where other improvements can be made.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for your sincere reply. I think the biggest problem with ODrive is that it sets up a 2-way sync which will delete your source data WITHOUT WARNING YOU. A responsible software developer will put in many precautions and warnings before DELETING YOUR DATA, even if the goal is to make the interface as easy to use as possible. This is where ODrive completely fails, and I will not be using it in the future. I was able to recover my data using Recuva deep scan (and recent local backups), but for many people, this has the potential to be catastrophic. I’ve set up GoodSync to copy data to OneDrive, and so far it’s working well. GoodSync makes it very clear when you’re setting up a job to choose between a 2-way sync and a 1-way backup, and also has other precautions to keep previous files and make deletes recoverable. I do like ODrive’s idea of the placeholders, but the product’s primary function needs to be solid before a good feature like this can be appreciated. I understand the potential for data loss when setting up a 2-way sync, but your software REALLY needs to inform the user on how it operates and that it’s deleting your data.
Thanks for your time,
Matt
Hi @matt4,
Thanks for your feedback. I am really, really glad to hear you were able to recover the data.
For deletion prevention, we have safeguards in place for committing remote deletes (https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#section--recover-files-from-trash-), but there is currently a gap for local deletes, either initiated by a remote change or by a local user-action.
The OS trash is not a good enough fallback since Windows will sometimes decide not to move things to its trash, or the user could have that disabled, entirely. After speaking with the team about these types of scenarios, we will have a “local trash” feature in the next generation product that will hold all odrive-facilitated deletes in a special “local odrive trash”.
We anticipate some complaints about this since it adds another step to deleting data, but we think the benefits of preventing accidental or unintentional deletes outweighs the extra steps needed to explicitly delete data.
Tony,
It’s good to hear you’ll be addressing this in a future version. I think an option that is enabled by default, and can be disabled easily, would suffice. That way, people who are just setting up and getting used to the product are protected, and it can be disabled later when you have everything set up, similar to what GoodSync does.
Thanks and good luck,
Matt