So I’m using odrive, amongst other things, to backup all my photos and videos to my amazon cloud. Odrive is syncing a local folder we’ll call “D:\Photos”. All good.
It’s also created a folder at"%USERPROFILE%\odrive" which has an Amazon Cloud Drive subfolder with pointers to all my photos. If those get downloaded I’ll end up with two copies of each photo on my local drives.
My question is, if I enabled automatic “Unsync” will this just remove these files from my odrive folder, or will they also get removed from the master location on my disk (which is the last thing I want as the idea is to have files at home and in the cloud as backups)?
(Follow on question, do I have to have an odrive folder? In my use case it’s not that useful.)
Hi @Triscopic,
Auto-unsync will affect all folders odrive sees, so you won’t want to enable that in your use case. You can’t remove the default odrive folder, but you can just unsync everything inside of it, so it ends up with only placeholders for your links. At that point it will stay that way until you change it. You can leave it be and only work out of your mapped folder on D:.
So, to confirm the (admittedly unexpected) scenario:
I have a folder (e.g. C:\Stuff) that I also want to back up into an odrive folder to sync with another PC
I right-click it, and “Sync to odrive”
On the other PC, I make an empty folder at C:\Stuff and right-click it, “Sync to odrive” and point it at the same storage
The files are now synching two-way between the two devices - SUCCESS
A month later, files will start unsynching from C:\Stuff on both PCs due to lack of access
What is the logic behind making a non-odrive folder (which is what it is in this case) also unsync?
My use case in this instance is application log files, which are searchable and can be used infrequently for reporting, however are not accessed until required. Replacing them with placeholders may not be immediately obvious inside the software, as it simply indexes the logs matching the pattern when a report is run, and will not return any data from the missing logs.
I guess that makes sense. I’m very much a command-line guy, but I also like having things “out of the box” as much as possible. The more custom setup you have, the harder it is to troubleshoot and the longer it takes to recreate it next time.
On this note - is there a way to easily see, ideally with a GUI, which folders have which sync rules saved? It seems that if I set a sync rule of “Download Nothing, but include subfolders and new items” (to recreate the folder tree but keep all files as placeholders) on a folder, it overwrites any specific sync rules on subfolders as well - it gets somewhat difficult to track which folders are synching with which rules.
Hi @yukihyou,
Unfortunately there isn’t a way to list all of the rules applied. When you apply a rule to a top folder and choose to “Include subfolders” it will apply the configuration to all subfolders underneath.
In our next generation of odrive, which is currently nearing the tail-end of development (no set release date, yet), the configurations are easier to manage with a GUI specifically created for that purpose.
Unfortunate that it’s not easily visible, but I think I can deal with that for the most part for now.
As a new user, I will avoid a lot of the “You’ve promised this new version forever, I’m done waiting!” themes I’m seeing, and wait and see how it goes. The current version is working for me as-is, for the most part, with only minor annoyances that make it feel “unpolished” rather than “broken” - probably due to being conditioned by Dropbox’s fantastic UX.
