This is a request for odrive to publish a definitive set of user manual pages explaining the installation, operation and removal instructions for odrive, odrive PRO, odrive Spaces, and odrive Encryption products, as well as any other product offerings yet to come.
Most of the points have been discussed in the blog pages and the user forum, but now that odrive is becoming a more commercial product there needs to be an authoritative, well organized, indexed, reference for all of the functions and behaviors.
If this is on-line somewhere I have yet to find it, but I can find plenty of places where support staff have re-posted the same set of instructions for removal, or workarounds, or promised features. We should not need to search through all of the discussion to find out how it’s supposed to work.
The technical user manual should be separate from the simplified marketing pages on the odrive website. Those are fine as far as they go, but this forum is full of complicated corner-cases with unexpected behaviors and unexpected results and actual bug reports. The marketing side makes it look simple, (as it should!) but in reality this product is really, really complicated. The interface needs to be intuitive, but all the different cloud storage systems behave differently, have different errors, protools, security structures and business models. These are two different points of view and two different audiences.
I’m looking for things like an explanation that odrive PRO is meant to map ONE local storage location to ONE cloud location (e.g. (on a Mac) /Volumes/USB_Storage/Project/Folder to ~odrive/Folder) and any other machines where you run odrive should access the Folder content in the ~odrive/Folder location. PRO is not meant to try to sync two different folders to the same cloud location. (Well, unless it is meant to do that, but Till Krueger’s recent post seems to indicate that it is not).
I’m looking for what causes a file to become listed as a “conflict” and what is the procedure to resolve a conflict?
I’m looking for what causes a PRO sync location to be listed as “[invalid]” and how can we avoid or fix that? (This might be a bug, and I have a workaround, but the customer should know what to do when “invalid” appears, and they should also know that the word “invalid” might appear in the first place and why.)
I’m looking for an explanation of when to use “Refresh” and what to expect it to do. Yes, I know the words on the menu are meant to be intuitive and simple, but not everybody gets it and not everybody thinks the words mean the same thing.
I’m looking for how does the end user see a log of connections, handshakes, uploads and downloads to feel confident that all that expected is really happening, that their accounts work and so forth. I am sure that odrive does not want to become the middleman for every end user support or connection issue on earth!
(And I am confident that it will be that big some day! The present arrangement of not logging any of the transactions except in a log visible to developers at odrive in response to a manual request made in a public forum might be OK for development, but certainly not on a large commercial scale. It’s OK when there re a few hundred users on a forum, but what about 10,000? Or several millions?)
So now you know why i think there needs to be some better documentation around this place!
Thanks!
Doug