Unsync - what am i doing wrong?

Having read Sync Differently (http://bit.ly/2en8noA) I was inspired to give odrive a go. I’ve installed the free trial and linked all my cloud accounts.

I now see all my cloud content in 1 location, great. BUT all my files are still local on my hard drive. If I “unsync” a folder in my local dropbox, I get taken to a web page which asks me to specify a cloud directory, and promptly duplicates the content. Duplicating files is not what I understood the concept of “un-sync” to be: Am I doing something wrong?

Hi @the_drew,
If I’m understanding correctly you have odrive installed and your accounts linked and now you want to remove the local data that exists in the original storage app folders (like the Dropbox folder). Is that correct?

odrive doesn’t try to touch anything outside of its scope, so it will not know anything about the original folders you had. Because of that you cannot unsync them. It sounds like you were doing a right-click"sync to odrive" on those folders, where it was taking you to the web client to pick a remote location.

Instead, if you are happy with the way odrive is setup and wish to move to it, exclusively, you should uninstall the other applications and (only after uninstalling the apps) remove their folders. Then you can access your data from the odrive folder, removing any redundancy and only locally caching the files/folders you need.

Does that make sense?

Hi Tony

Yes you understand me correctly. I was hoping odrive would help consolidate the management of all my disparate clouds into 1 “console” and then free up hard drive space locally, but if I understand what you’re saying, thats possible with the app but not standard behaviour.

Follow up question, files / folders I drop into the odrive folder locally, are they synced to a cloud location / can they be unsynced locally?

Hi @the_drew,
It actually is standard behavior, we just can’t control the other apps you have installed (like the Dropbox desktop client or the Google Drive client). Most folks will uninstall the other apps and remove their app data and then use odrive exlucsively, which give you the ability to manage disk space the way you want. odrive, by default, puts only placeholders down, so it uses as little space as possible, right from the outset.

Any files you drop into a linked storage folder inside odrive will sync to that storage. So, anything you drop into odrive\Dropbox, for example, will sync to dropbox. You can put files directly into the root of odrive ("/odrive") because there is no storage there to upload to.

Does that make sense?

Got it. Thanks. You can close the thread.

Great! Have a good weekend!