What actually happens when I move files on my local hard disc and how is delete working?

I use odrive to upload images to Amazon Drive. They upload only, no local sync of anything that may happen on the Amazon Drive (not that it should) and no local stubs. My disk is my master and the Amazon Drive a straight backup.

The local files are all images and I was wondering what happens if I move files between folders does everything get uploaded again or is there some intelligence applied to realise these are moves.

I’m not sure if it makes any difference to my question but I’m doing these moves from within Lightroom so I’m not sure if it actually moving the files or copying them and then deleting them (perhaps there isn’t a difference!)

For delete, are they deleted on Amazon Drive or just marked as deleted by odrive until I empty the odrive trash at which point the delete is executed on Amazon Drive, I ask because it seems the moved files are still in there original folders on Amazon Drive and also in their new ‘moved to’ destination. I cannot help but wonder if I’m better off stopping the odrive involvement in the deletion process and just rely Amazon Drive.

Thank you for our help

Hi @irwmain,
odrive will try to optimize moves, but there are scenarios where the optimization cannot be made so it ends up being a deleted and add of the file, rather than a move. This would also be the case if the application you are using is copying and deleting rather than moving.

In these cases the files in the original location will be picked up as deletes and the files in the new location will be synced as new files added to the folder. The deletes will be held in the odrive Trash until you empty it. If you haven’t emptied the trash then you will still see the “old” files on Amazon.

Hi

So, from within Lightroom, I moved 4736 images from 17 folders into a single folder. The new single folder on Amazon has all 4736 images and the original folders remain as I’m holding the ‘deletes’ in odrive. What does seem a little odd is that odrive is only showing 1981 files in the trash bin and if I sum all the images still on Amazon in the yet to be deleted folders there are 1989.

So I’m questioning whether there is any point in using odrive to hold the deletes as this is introducing an extra layer of complexity to go wrong and currently has not protected all the files unless of course Lightroom moved some files and copy and deleted others which I very much doubt.

I’m considering turning off odrive to hold the deletes and just rely on Amazon Drive holding the files for 30 days in trash.

Thank you for your help.

Hi @irwmain,
It’s possible lightroom was performing moves, but odrive was only able to optimize some of them. It sounds like the end result is good and you can clear the odrive trash.

You can certainly enable auto-trashing rules on odrive and rely on only Amazon Drive’s trash. Make sure you periodically check their trash within that 30 day period, just to be safe.