Hi. Currently we’re testing Odrive as a potential new sync solution for Google Suite Drive 2 way syncing, as Drive File Stream didn’t suit our needs and Backup & Sync proved to be unstable with large amounts of large files. We use 2 way sync to mirror our LAN server to Google Drive and back. After issues with Backup & Sync, we went through about a week where our LAN server files and Google Drive files underwent different changes (some people worked locally, others remotely).
Currently I’m running Odrive, and it’s been taking a few days to get the LAN server and the Google Drive storage in sync with eachother. I was very afraid that Odrive might mark any changes that happened on the local server in the last week for deletion, as these changes aren’t present on the Google Drive. So far, everything seems to be going well though.
However, I now noticed that if I create a new folder locally (on the LAN server) within a not yet fully synced folder, it gets deleted after a minute or so. What is the cause of this? Should I be scared of losing any actual files? How do I fix this? Thanks in advance!
Hi @skander,
Can you reproduce this effect and then send a diagnostic from the odrive menu, along with the path of the folder that is removed? I can take a closer look at what is happening.
I have reproduced the problem serveral times this afternoon (but didn’t generate a diagnostic). I see now that those earlier removed folders suddenly dó appear as .cloudf files in the same location. As if those folders will be “regenerated” during the syncing process?
The folder names were:
“test 2”
“nogmaals test”
“hoi drive”
I’m trying to reproduce the problem again, but it’s a bit unpredictable as to when the folder suddenly disappears. One folder vanished within a minute, the other after 10 minutes.
I have generated a diagnostic. Hopefully you can backtrack it to when the abovementioned folders suddenly disappeared earlier this afternoon? Otherwise I’ll have to try again tomorrow, as I’m unable to keep an eye on the new folder disappearing right now.
Hi @skander,
I took a look at the diagnostic. I was able to see the full life-cycle of “nogmaals test”. The other two had rolled off, already, so I couldn’t see all of the activity.
According to the diagnostic for “nogmaals test”:
The folder was created remotely by odrive after being picked up on the local system.
~10 minutes later odrive picked it up as deleted on the remote. This means that the listing of the parent folder that came back didn’t have this folder in it anymore.
~50 minutes later is showed up again in the listing and the placeholder was added locally to represent it.
Since odrive is busy syncing other files, the folder may have shown back up in the listing much sooner, but odrive didn’t see it yet because it hadn’t gotten a chance to list that folder again.
The folder being picked-up as remotely deleted after 10 minutes is definitely odd. We account for some latency in the listing after adding items, since most storage is “eventually consistent”, and it can take a little bit of time for the new object to show up in subsequent listings. Usually this is less than 30 seconds, though. For it to be missing after many minutes suggests a bug/hiccup on Google’s side, or another client acting on the storage that affected that folder in such as way as to cause it to be removed from the parent folder for a while.
Are there any other users/clients acting on the storage while you are performing your bulk upload?
Again, thanks for the super fast response and analysis, even though I forgot to exactly follow your instructions by not providing the full path
As for your question: Yes, probably other users were acting on the storage at that time, but I can’t say for sure if they were actually reading files or writing files at the exact same moment. The storage is constantly being used to retrieve source files which are processed on the client computers, after which the final output is transferred back to the storage. What I can say for sure though is that no user was acting on this specific folder at the same time (or even any folder one level up higher)
Thanks for the reply @skander
Are there any other sync engines acting on the storage, or just odrive?
It is definitely a strange set of events to happen over such a long period. odrive creates the folder, later asks Google for the listing of the parent folder and the new folder is no longer listed. Asks again later and it is listed.
Are you still seeing this happen with various folders, or did it seem to be isolated to that particular timeframe?
I haven’t heard any complaints from my colleagues, but to be sure I created a new folder to see if this happens again. I’ll check it later today.
There is no other sync engine acting on the storage. Other computers are also not interfacing with the remote storage through any sync engine, except for my own laptop, which has Drive File Stream installed. I usually don’t use it (haven’t used it yesterday either), so it shouldn’t be doing much at all.
