My migration from Amazon Drive to OneDrive haven’t gone smooth… My next problem is bizarre. After I set up a sync, I saw a lot of “Not allowed”. Every file and folder that wasn’t allowed seemed to have ÅÄÖ in them. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the files had been duplicated (exactly) and wasn’t allowed to be synced because they already existed in that location.
What’s going on here? This appears to be unrealted to my other problems with backups entirely.
I sent a diagnostic.
Hi @staffan,
These files look like they have the same name, but they are actually different.
Let’s take this file name, for example:
Scannat Ängsullsv…pdf
The above name looks the same as this file name:
Scannat Ängsullsv…pdf
However the 1st one uses unicode character U+00C4 (Latin Capital Letter A with Diaeresis) and the second one uses an “A” with unicode character U+0308 (Combining Diaeresis)
OneDrive must be doing some conversion on their side that makes these filename appear to be the same, even though they are different. If they were exactly the same Windows wouldn’t allow you to have two of them.
Maybe OneDrive isn’t accepting one of the characters and is converting it. However, I wonder why the old one is still there. It’s pretty annoying. It’s hundreds of files and folders that are being duplicated, and Odrive has to be involved in making/keeping them I think? The appropriate action would be to keep the newer files, I suppose. Otherwise they would just be converted again.
Do you know of a safe and fast way of removing the duplicates?
Hi @staffan,
From the logs I was looking at, it looked like these duplicates already existed by the time odrive encountered them. You can see in this progression that odrive sees the new data to upload, creates the parent folder, and starts uploading the files inside:
01 Feb 06:51:28PM INFO Successful Create Folder (Local to Remote) for D:/odrive/Luckycat/Documents/Angsullsvagen/Dokument
01 Feb 06:51:30PM INFO Successful Upload File for Item: D:/odrive/Luckycat/Documents/Angsullsvagen/Dokument/Scannat Ängsullsv..pdf - Size: 1622690 Bytes - Date: 2019-05-12 22:00:35
01 Feb 06:51:31PM ERROR Failed Upload File for Item: D:/odrive/Luckycat/Documents/Angsullsvagen/Dokument/Scannat Ängsullsv..pdf - Size: 1622690 Bytes - Date: 2019-05-12 22:00:35 - Error: code OD_PATH_ALREADY_EXISTS caused by OneDriveRequestException(code OD_PATH_ALREADY_EXISTS - {"error":{"code":"nameAlreadyExists","message":"An item with the same name already exists under the parent"}})
There are no downloads from OneDrive and odrive will never create any files on its own.
I also tested using the same file name in a few different scenarios and did not encounter any instances where a copy of the file was automatically created with the different unicode character. I was able to reproduce the OneDrive issue where Microsoft is treating these two different names the same, though, so they must be normalizing the name somehow.
Did these files come from Amazon Drive?
If so, are you able to see if they exist there too?
For removing the duplicates:
odrive should be tracking these in the “not allowed” list as it hits them. You can get a full listing of this by clicking on “Detailed odrive status” in the odrive tray menu.
Once you have the list, you could sanitize it to just the file paths and use a bash or powershell script to move the files to another location or delete them.
You’re right. These files were created earlier, I just noticed now because of the move. The duplicates are on Amazon Drive also. Maybe it has to do with Windows/Mac and Amazons ability to sence the difference in character encoding?
I’ll probably never understand exactly how these dublicates got made, but thanks for looking into it in depth. I really appreciate it.
This continues to be a problem. Odrive duplicates files if you move between MacOS and Windows. At least that’s what I think. I use Windows for the connected sync drive, but it used to be connected to my Mac. All files are duplicated, and I get “not allowed” for all of them. All the time.
”Detailed Odrive status” results in nothing happening at all. Finding out which duplicate to remove continues to be a mystery.
I have so much problems with Odrive, that I think I will have to abandon this solution (as it’s no longer a solution).
It affects only files with non-english letters. My ugly solution is to remove those. Feels like being back in the 90:s, but I hope this solves the matter.
I believe this has to do with how OneDrive is normalizing files, but if you can send a diagnostic after this happens again, I can take another look. The diagnostics in newer versions are a bit more detailed and may provide some insight. Just let me know if you send one.
One of the duplicates actually seems to represent the charcters åäö with two characters. When I delete for example a ö, it becomes one o. It looks like I just delete a hidden character… I don’t know. Syncing when moving attached drives between Mac and Windows appears to generate duplicates.
