Restore original synced folder locations after system restore

Hi there ODrive team,
This is a pretty simple issue and I’m surprised it hasn’t been addressed yet.

I’ve synced a number of folders to my oDrive account (into Amazon S3 if I recall properly)
These folders were on a Windows 10 machine.
The folders lived in their native locations (i.e. Documents/test project) or (D:\Recordings)
In order to access them from a remote machine, I would have to use the odrive root folder and go from there.
Granted, on the desktop the files were also in the oDrive root, but I simply used their native locations to save space in my oDrive folder.
On the desktop, the files continued to live and breathe in their original locations.
Everything was fine in oDrive land, until…

I had to format my system.
I reinstalled Windows 10 and reinstalled all software from the ground up.
This caused the issue that I’m writing in about.
Those “native” locations to still existed (many were on external storage)
But oDrive’s only association to those cloud files is in the oDrive root.
I need to re-associate the oDrive directories to the directories on the other drives, exactly like it was before the format.

I can’t just move my oDrive directory as I work with very large files regularly and I would like to break up the space it takes on my computer. For example, my recordings directory is almost 600GB in size, and then I have other directories for video editing, etc, each residing on their own drives.

I’d also LOVE to avoid having to resync all of that data if possible.

Looking forward to some kind of solution here. Thanks!

Hi @cfern87,
It sounds like you had setup “sync to odrive” folders on the previous system. You just need to replicate that setup on the current system.

Take a look at the documentation here and let me know if you have any questions: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/manage-sync#section-sync-external-folders

Yup, definitely did. Just to confirm, setting up these existing folders to “sync to odrive” will not erase, overwrite, or modify any of the files on my cloud storage - sounds like there would need to be some kind of synchronization occuring.

To further complicate matters, I had some files as placeholders, and others downloaded, and my data is very important, so I don’t want to risk using it.

Hi @cfern87,
odrive will perform a scan of the local and remote locations in the “sync to odrive” relationship and determine what is different. It will sync local differences to the remote and it will show remote files that don’t exist locally as placeholder files.

Remote files could be modified/overwritten if there are files on the local side that do not match files of the same name on the remote side.

You can try the setup on a test folder, or a small dataset if you want to observe the behavior.