I have just reinstalled my mac. I was using oDrive synch with my Amazon Drive. The oDrive folder was in an external HD as it’s about 3Tb. It’s a free Odrive account so all the content of Amazon Drive is on the HD, it’s an exact mirror.
I have installed oDrive on the reinstalled Mac, that by default creates the folder on a default location. My question is:
Can I select as oDrive folder destination the oDrive folder that i have on the external HD ? ¿Will it keep the data stored on that folder instead of trying to download everything again?
I would not want to select the old oDrive folder and having all my data already on the HD deleted.
What’s the behaviour of oDrive in this situation? How does it work if you select an old odrive folder as location?
Hi @supercelula,
We don’t officially support having the main odrive folder on an external drive but you should be able to make use of an existing odrive folder as a reinstall with these steps:
Install odrive and log in with the same account (very important)
Move the odrive folder, using the feature located in the odrive tray menu, and point it to the original odrive folder. That folder will need to be named “odrive”, but that should already be the case if you were using it before.
odrive will make a best effort to reconcile the items in the folder with the items in the cloud. Since it sounds like you have lots of data it could take a while. After the move, you may find that restarting odrive is needed to get it to kick off its full scan immediately (or just wait a while).
Important Note:
Data in Encryptor folders cannot be “insta-synced” like other data because of the encryption involved. That is one caveat to this process. With Encryptor folders you will end up re-uploading data in the above scenario.
Thanks, Tony. The folder on External HD is called odrive, it was working until yesterday that I had to reinstall OS. No change on cloud folder neither in that time.
So after making this question I was imagining three possible scenarios that would happen:
1.- After moving, odrive can’t recognize the odrive folder, it takes it as new and deletes the data and updates from the data on the cloud.
2.- After moving, odrive finds a odrive folder he recognizes and works as it nothing happened.
3.- After moving, odrive finds a odrive folder he recognizes but has to check on everything to be sure. Not necessary downloading all but checking.
From your words it seems to be the third one, am I right?
Hi @supercelula,
That is correct. Once you choose to move the odrive folder and select the old odrive folder as the destination, odrive will need to scan through everything to figure out what is synced. It can take quite a bit of time if there is a lot of data to go through.
In the scenario where a drive has failed and a fresh new one is provided, would it be safe to assume odrive will first notify that it can’t find the odrive folder and if I point it to an empty odrive folder on the new drive, everything from the cloud should sync down and we should not be worried that everything in the cloud will become deleted to match the empty folder?
Hi @p_ingram3541,
If the odrive folder disappears then odrive will have nothing to do and will list the drive as being in an invalid state. You can choose to find the drive again. If the folder you point to is empty, odrive will think that you have purposely removed all of the data it still remembers, and it will end up being listed in the odrive trash.
If you are starting with an empty odrive folder, I would recommend just deactivating the authorized user from the odrive menu and then logging in again, which starts everything fresh, without carrying over the old “memory” of the data.
Awe ok, I must admit I got impatient and tried to fumble through it on my own. I renamed the original folder while odrive was not running and then created a new empty odrive folder and then started odrive up. Upon startup I saw it created a Amazon folder with a .cloudf extension. initially choosing to sync resulted on an error, something about sftp connection error but a few moments later it started syncing the 1st sub-folder level and now I can sync down what I need at will.
I still have my original 100% backup on another drive but I will use this approach to minimize MAC drive corruption from wreaking havoc on my “good” files in the cloud.
So I may have asked this before in the past. How should I go about the re-setup of an odrive installation state? Since this is my personal data and since I’m not capable of meretriciously remembering minor details that make a big difference, I thought I would ask before I create mess.
It’s simple: I have a fresh installation of Windows 10 again. I have a separate hard drive with everything synced to with odrive.
Steps should be:
install odrive
re-initialize somehow?
skip the process of having to re-download everything?
I know there is a method to prevent re-downloading.