I’ve just set up a new Mac (running Catalina) by transferring everything from my old Mac. I have always kept four odrive folders (two Dropbox, two Google Drive) in the “odrive” folder (see attached) – these folders synced, but none of these files within them synced when I set up the new machine.
However, odrive also created a backup folder and stored it under my username, and then auto-synced all of these files. Now when I search for a file, Finder serves up only files from the Backup. (Or, if I manually sync the file from the odrive folder above, I get two results, one from the backup and one from the odrive>Google Drive> folder.)
For a number of reasons, I don’t want to use the Backup as my default folder, but I’m not sure how to clean this all up.
Any suggestions would be welcome!
Hi @lori,
I think I know what happened here.
When you copied the items from the old computer to the new one, the old odrive databases couldn’t be read by the new computer, since they are encrypted and the new computer doesn’t know the key. When this happens odrive renames the odrive folder and then creates a new one, which will have all placeholders.
As long as you haven’t made any new changes in the current odrive folder, you can replace the contents of it with the contents of the backup folder and odrive will scan through it to determine what is already synced.
To do this, perform the following steps.
- Exit odrive
- Delete or move the current contents in the odrive folder. The folder names in this folder should match the ones inside the backup folder. This should be the case, but just double-check.
- Move the contents of the odrive backup folder into the odrive folder.
- Start odrive again
Let me know if you have any questions on the above or if anything doesn’t make sense/match-up
Thanks, Tony, for the quick response.
Sadly, I have already made new changes in the current odrive folder – probably 20-30 files over a dozen folders. I imagine there’s a process whereby I can painstakingly work through my “recent files” to transfer these over to the corresponding odrive backup folders, and then follow the steps you listed above. Otherwise, is there a way to make my new odrive folders my default, and set odrive to back these up (and then delete the old backup?)
I’d obviously appreciate guidance as to the most streamlined process!
Hi @lori,
If you aren’t concerned about having to re-download data then you can just continue to work out of the new odrive folder and remove the backup folder. The only reason to move the data over from the backup is to avoid having to download a bunch of data again from the remote storage. It sounds like this may not be an issue for you, though.
At this point odrive shouldn’t even know or care about the backup folder. Just to make sure, though, can you send a diagnostic from the odrive tray menu? I just want to make sure there aren’t any sync folder relationships that may have been setup against the backup folder by mistake.
Hi @lori,
It looks like you have one “sync to odrive” folder defined within the backup folder:
/Users/LoriDWilson/odrivebackup-2020-10-26-1346/Google Drive EffectX/Templeton Religion Trust/ASU Feedback Contract
You’ll want to remove that by right-clicking on that folder and selecting “remove sync”. This will remove the relationship (it won’t delete any data). Once removed, the backup folder will not be needed anymore. Then you can use the default odrive folder for access from then on.
Fabulous. This may not be a seamless solution but it’s definitely the best option for where my files are right now. I so appreciate your checking what’s going on in the background so I don’t lose anything.
Thanks for your help untangling all this!
Best,
Lori