Sync not completing (Box)

I have a folder with about 9 GB of data that I want to upload to my Box account so I thought I’d give odrive a try to see how it does the job. Unfortunately, it doesn’t perform too well. Upload speeds are fine, but it doesn’t seem to be able to complete the upload of some files. I conclude this from the following observations:

  1. In the past few days, odrive has uploaded 22+ GB (see screenshot) (It has also downloaded more than 700 MB and I have no idea where that comes from since I did not sync or open any files on odrive. But that’s another story.)

    Note that the total amount of data odrive should be uploading is 9 GB.

  2. When I check the Box folder on my odrive for folders that are not yet synced (the ones with the pink circle), I find that each of them has exactly one file with a pink circle, i.e. one file that is not synced.

  3. In addition, there are many files and folders.that have neither the blue circle (=synced) nor the pink one. So for those ones, it is entirely unclear whether they are synced or not.

Hi @tophee,
Are there any large files in that data set? It is possible that large file upload is having an issue, where something happens that interrupts the upload and it has to start again. This is something that is not uncommon to see during bulk upload, depending on the upload speed, among other factors.

What currently shows as syncing in the odrive tray menu?

What’s a “large” file? There are many files between 50 and 100 MB, but I wouldn’t consider that large these days. Besides, many of these files are uploading no problem. In fact, as I said, there is only one file in each folder that doesn’t seem to upload. The others in the same folder are of the same type and size.

Uload speed is excellent. Since I wrote files the above ticket, odrive has uploaded another 15 GB or so:

It is constantly using something between 3 and 100 Mbps of my network bandwidth

Aah, the tray menu! What a handy feature. Yes, it shows a list of 10 files being uploaded, with percentages progressing rapidly. I took a screenshot of it and will check later whether these particular files are uploaded correctly.

What about files and folders missing any odrive indicator (neither uploaded nor waiting)?

Christoph

Hi,
Items that are waiting or queued will not have an odrive icon overlay (only synced or currently transferring). The absence of an icon overlay indicates that the file is not-yet synced and not in the process of actively syncing (or that odrive is not running).

It sounds like its possible there are a few files that are attempting to upload, failing, and retrying. If you send along a diagnostic, which is an option accessible from the odrive tray menu, I can take a look and see if anything stands out.

Thanks!

I clicked on “Send diagnostics” and then on “send report” but nothing happened…

It looks like you might be out of Box storage. Can you see if there are any items in the “Not Allowed” section of the odrive tray menu. If there are, click on one of the items listed and see if it shows a storage error.

Indeed, my Box seems to be full. I have contacted Box about this, because I believe they are miscalculating the space I use,

But regardless of box being full, why does odrive nevertheless upload huge amoounts of data? And given that Box wont accept any incoming files at the moment: where is it uploading to?? I had to quit odrive bacause it just wouldn’t stop using bandwidth.

We are taking a look at this to see how it can be better handled.

What makes the situation not as straightforward is that Box will let things upload even though there is insufficient space. It doesn’t tell us that until the files is all the way up, then it rejects the transfer.

The files should end up in the “Not allowed” section of the odrive tray menu, and clicking on one should show the “out of storage” exception. Did you see that?

Since this exception is considered a transient situation (the user can correct the problem at any time), the operation is retried after waiting a while. If the issue is not remedied then the uploads will continue to be done, rejected, and then retried sometime later.

Yes, the files are showing up under “not allowed”.

I can see that my situation is a bit special (bulk upload of several GB) but I’d say it only made things worse, it did not cause the problem. What I mean is that if my upload hadn’t been so big, the damage in terms of wasted uload bandwidth hadn’t been so big, but there would still have been a problem, namely that odrive is repeatedly failing to sync files which users would presume to be synced after a reasonable amount of time. Of course you can check the context menu at regular intervalls but I think the minimum I would expect odrive to do is issue some warning.A better solution would be that odrive stopps trying after a ertain number of tries (configurable). Better still: if you can find a way to make box tell you how much space it has left, odrive could warn the user ahead of any failure that there won’t be enough space in the cloud.

I also would like ti say that I find your “Send diagnostics” function problematic from a privacy/ data protection point of view as well as from a pure userfriendliness point of view. The latter is because it is unclear to the user whether anything has been sent after clicking “Send report”). But the bigger problem is that the user has no idea what exactly is being sent. I don’t think that procedure will hold against most privacy/ data protection law… It shouldn’t be too much of a deal to display the entire report before sending it.