Setting up The Cloud

I Have a Question
,
1

so the manual/tutorial pages tell you how to synch your cloud stuff to your hard drive… and sorta presume you already have your stuff in the cloud.

but i am a new… “cloudbie”? and a little unsure…

1: i right click my work directories and select ‘synch to odrive’, and then select my backblaze bucket where they will be stored. (yes, i realize this is a premium feature and will pay.)

2: …is odrive going to delete these local directories after synching, or does that only happen in the actual odrive directory?

3: i saw an answer on another topic about keeping local files. you set the directory synch to ‘always download everything,’ right? i guess that’s the same as ‘don’t delete these’?

4: if i then want to NOT keep local copies of some of these directories… do i just delete them from my hard drive? wouldn’t that delete the .odrive file in the directory? and wouldn’t that be bad?

…did i ask too many questions in one topic? : /

2

Hi @BLR,
Thanks for reaching out!

1
Yes, you can use the “sync to odrive” option to select existing folders on system and sync the contents to and from a remote folder.

By default odrive will create an “odrive” folder that allows you to browse your linked storage. In this case your remote storage would be empty if you are starting from scratch, but you can copy or move data into the local folder and it will be uploaded to B2.

2
odrive will ensure that the local and remote sides stay in sync with each other. odrive will never delete local data without a remote delete action prompting the local reflection.

In other words, if you delete data on the remote storage, odrive will see that these items are now missing and will attempt to sync those changes to the local system. This will result in odrive moving the corresponding local items to the OS trash (Recycle Bin/Trash).

Local deletes work similarly. odrive will see that local items are now missing from an odrive folder. The sync engine will want to sync these changes to the remote storage. By default, odrive will “hold” these changes in an “odrive trash”. This trash doesn’t hold local data, but it holds the remote delete instructions, preventing them from being sent to the remote storage until you empty the trash from the odrive tray menu or set auto-trash rules to do this automatically.

3
There are rules you can setup for a folder that dictate how odrive treats new files/folders that show up on the remote storage (B2). You can set the rules to always download new data. odrive will never delete data unless you explicitly direct it to.

4
If you want to free up space on your drive you would use the “unsync” option. This replaces the local items with “placeholder” files that take up no space. If you do this with a folder it will collapse it down into a single placeholder file, like what you see in the default odrive folder when you first install odrive.

Since this is sync, you would not want to delete items on the local side because odrive will see those deletes and want to reflect them on the remote side. odrive has an “odrive trash” to prevent unintended deletes, however. https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#recover-files-from-trash

Sync is bidirectional, which means that odrive will try to keep both the local and remote sides the same in terms of what content is represented/available. We also have a backup feature that will allow you to backup a designated folder. This creates a one-way relationship between the local and remote folders. All local content will be upload to the remote storage (B2), but remote content that is not already on the local side will not be shown. Backup will also never reflect any deletes, so if you delete something on the local side the delete will not be mirrored on the remote side. More on that here: https://www.odrive.com/features/backup

Just let me know if you have any other questions or if you would like any additional clarification on the above.

3

okay, so…

1: i go to my local drive, and select sync for my “work” directory, and subdirectories, etc. then odrive uploads them to B2 (where i told it to put them.)

2: once everything is on B2, i right click my local directories and select “unsynch.” that replaces my local files with the zero-density placeholders.
–sorry, i just tried this, and there was no ‘unsynch’ option. only ‘remove synch.’ (EDIT :sorry, still tinkering. i see it works on oDrive files and directories, or ‘original’ files, but NOT directories. is it supposed to behave that way?)

3: then… if i want to open/work on one of those files…
(EDIT: yeah, i figured this one out too. sorry. shutting up now…)

i think i mostly get it now. i will experiment with a test directory :wink:

thanks a bunch!

oh, um, about previous # 2 (odrive never deleting local data). just so you know, in case anyone else is as ‘special’ as me… :X

i put a copy of one of my work folders under odrive, as a test. then when i found out i could just synch it from it’s current location, i did that… and i deleted the copy from the odrive directory.

well, every time i started up, it would pop up and tell me that there was one new trash item (it wasnt new, though, it was there a few days :X) and if i emptied the trash, it would remove that item from the remote drive. which isn’t what i wanted to do, as that directory on the remote drive was synched with the real directory, now.

haha, then just to see what it would do, i did empty the trash. so… yeah, odrive removed the remote directory, and since the original local directory was synched to it, it removed THAT from my hard drive. (no harm done, though, i recovered the files.)

not an everyday scenario. but could happen.

4

Hi @BLR!

It looks like you’ve got things mostly figured out, but I’ll run through a couple of things, just in case.

2
The “sync to odrive” folder won’t have an “unsync” option, but you can select the items within that folder and then select “unsync”. I think you already found this out, but I wanted to make sure.

The “Remove sync” option will remove the sync relationship that was created when using the “sync to odrive” feature. When you do this that folder will no longer sync with its remote counterpart. If you want to maintain that sync relationship, click on the folder again, select “sync to odrive”, and then setup the relationship again, as you did before. Then you can navigate into this folder and select files or folders (or everything) to “unsync” to free up disk space.

For the directory that was deleted:
All of your linked data is accessible and syncable via the default odrive folder, so it is possible to have the same data visible in multiple locations if you are using the default odrive folder and a “sync to odrive” folder. Generally folks will use one or the other for a specific location. If you have a “sync to odrive” relationship setup for your local “Documents” folder, pointing to “B2/Documents” on the remote storage, you can keep the local “odrive/B2/Documents folder” unsynced, since it is redundant in this case.

I will also added some additional clarification to #2 in my previous post.

5

great!

i think i am all set, thank you! :slight_smile: