So, two questions here that I always wanted to know but didn’t want to test myself because I’m afraid something might get deleted, so:
Does odrive work with symlinks or junctions? And I don’t mean the PRO feature, but I might have a symlink for other purposes so I need this. Couldn’t find any right anwer here.
What if I uninstall odrive and reinstall, or reinstall windows or anything, but the odrive folder is already preloaded with files from the previous installation. Can I just leave them there? will they be recognized by odrive and just skip them, or does it need to redownload them, or worse, create some confusion, deletions, or duplicates?
We don’t officially support user-created junctions/symlinks/hardlinks for a number of reasons. The short of it is that the behavior can be unpredictable and users can get into some disastrous situations in certain circumstances, especially with certain types of storage sources. I saw a case during my testing where the entire source folder was destroyed after a remote rename of a symlinked directory. It also complicates sync substantially and can create issues with reflection/pick-up of changes, issues with permissions, CPU heat, disk churn, inaccurate scans, and other problems.
We spent a lot of time working on Pro Sync to officially support and facilitate these types of relationships. With Pro Sync you can target any local directory and have that sync to any location in your odrive-linked storage. You can find out more about that here:
Pro sync’s mapping is a safest and most reliable way to facilitate this type of a relationship. Since we are dealing with user data, which we hold sacred, we want to make sure this type of advanced setup is possible, but done correctly.
This all being said, it is your system and you are free to do whatever you feel is best for your own use case and skill level. Technically you may be able to get these types of file system-level links to work, but it is not something we test anymore. If they do end up working for you, I, unfortunately, can’t guarantee they will continue working into the future.
This is a complicated question because the accuracy of detection can vary between sources. We attempt to detect identical files and will not re-upload them if we determine they are the same. In most cases and sources this works pretty well. It is a best-effort sort of thing. The general answer is that “it should work”, but you will want to keep an eye on it if you run through this scenario.