"set auto download" - does what?

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1

Hi - I can’t find this in the documentation at all - it only refers to a download limit - is that the same thing?

2

You can set auto download limit from odrive tray menu as per your needs.

  1. Never download: use this option if you don’t want to sync your files automatically when you expand placeholder folders or when new contents are added into cloud storage from another client.
  2. 10 MB, 100MB, 500 MB: use this option if you want to sync your files automatically when you expand placeholder or when new contents are added into cloud storage from another client which falls under selected size. Let suppose, if user has “10 MB” then all files less than or equal to 10MB will be automatically download in expanded folders.
  3. Always download: use this option if you want to sync all your files (any size) automatically when you expand placeholder folders or when new contents are added into cloud storage from another client.

Please read more about “Auto Download Limit” here:

Thanks,
Asif

3

Yes, “set auto download” and “download limit” are interchangeably used terms in forum.

4

Thank you!

So does turning this on only download the files in a folder, or does it recursively download subfolders and files in subfolders?

5

You can use “auto download limit” feature to automatically download files in folders and sub-folders which are already in expanded state in your local machine. Files won’t sync if parent folder is still a placeholder folder in odrive.

To recursively sync all files and folders, I believe you should set “Sync folder rules”.

Set download to Everything
Set include Subfolders to “Checked”
Save and apply to new files and folders to “Checked”

Find more details here:

Thanks,
Asif

6

Just to be clear, does this mean if you are on the free version, your files never automatically download?

This is actually really unclear today and if the answer is yes, this is actually a really bad thing if you store things where syncing between multiple computers is important (like 1password stores). Really bad to the point of data-loss of highly sensitive information.

7

Hi @michael.m.wasser,
Default behavior is to lay down placeholders for files, unless they have been explicitly selected for download previously.

Files that you have chosen to download (are no longer placeholder files) will auto-download if they are updated. So if you have chosen to download a certain file on two computers, and you update the file on one computer, the file will be auto-downloaded to the latest version on the other computer.

8

Thanks for the clarification. Related: with the free version, do new files automatically sync (download and upload all changes all the time when the change happens) if you previously told the everything to sync? I noticed I can’t check that box anymore on the free version but it’s not entirely clear given the language used in the UI if this is the case or not …

9

Hi @michael.m.wasser,
Any files you you change or add locally will upload automatically.

Any brand new files or folders that are created remotely to the local system will show up as placeholders, regardless of if you have previously performed a recursive sync on that area.

You can assign “folder sync rules” to folders that override odrive’s default behavior to always expand new folders and download new files within the folder, instead of laying them down as placeholders. This is a premium feature and you can learn more about it here: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-source-changes#section-configure-folder-sync-rules

10

Cool, thanks for the help + rapid responses!

Just for feedback and less relevant for this thread (though I couldn’t figure out how to share it off the thread and thought you might care for it), this by itself is enough for me to need to immediately switch back to just plain old google drive. I was kind of hoping the idea would be as a baseline you’d support features you get for free from vendors directly with odrive and features that are odrive specific (like partial sync) would be paid as they offer new features you wouldn’t otherwise have. Not automatically just syncing everything really breaks the usage model of cloud storage like Google Drive and Dropbox… foe example, 1password creates a file per password entry. Making me have to re-sync every time I create a password for fear of db consistency issues is a non-starter for me using odrive.

Unfortunately, this was also unclear behavior and not-intuitive given documentation and I had to rely on this forum post for clarification and had thought things were getting synced until I realized stuff was missing for about a month.

Also on pricing, given I $2/mo for google drive, its hard to justify a monthly service fee 3 times the cost of the storage for a tool I can get for free. I could imagine this makes more sense we I’d need like TB of storage, but not today.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks again, you’ve been very helpful thus far and hope you folks build a great product for your users!

11

Thanks or the feedback @michael.m.wasser.

We are working on several things in our next release that will help the areas you mentioned, so keep an eye out.