What would be the safest method for an Windows OS reinstall?

I Have a Question
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I don’t know where to begin, but before I transition to a clean state of Windows 10 (100% clean reformat of my main SSD) I am thinking of what I should do beforehand. I am holding off on buying a 10TB drive and I was thinking that the safest and probably fastest method to migrate over is to wait until I get that 10TB and then just move everything I have to that drive, and then do what I need to on the SSD. I don’t mind the wait, I wonder though, since I have 300 GBs of Lightroom / Photo data and I’m still wondering how I should re-sync that data on my new setup in the future. It looks like "1TB Blue WD" -> "Files Synced to ODrive (backup)"

So I guess all I need to do is keep the same path names and odrive will do its thing?

I’m worried the sync process would break something? Would the safest thing be to archive and un-sync it and re-upload everything? I don’t mind the waiting of re-uploading as I trust the upstream process more than the downstream process.

Any thoughts would be helpful. I’m not trying to rush this as I want to migrate slowly and safely.

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Hi @christianorpinell,
Just to be clear, the goal is:

  • Reinstall your Windows OS and ensure that the existing 300GB of data an be copied over and available in the newly installed OS?
  • Make sure that that 300GB is in-sync again, using odrive, as you have currently?
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Yes. If I could re-sync without uploading or downloading that would be the best method. I guess I would just have to make sure that when I move my files over to the larger HDD that the files names and paths are the same? Same HDD name too (doubt that would effect things)?

4

Hi @christianorpinell,
For all non-Encryptor data, you can basically just copy/move the local data over into the newly initialized odrive folder, alongside the linked storage placeholders. The steps would be:

  1. Install odrive on the new system, go through the setup process, and log back in (make sure you are logging in as the same user you were using previously).
  2. Once odrive fully initializes the go to the new odrive folder, which should now have all placeholder (.cloudf) files…
  3. Go to the old/backup odrive folder from the previous install/computer and move all of the folders inside that old/backup odrive folder to the new odrive folder. You will end up with “real” folders and .cloudf placeholders sitting alongside each other, at first. Once odrive starts processing it will replace the .cloudf files in there “real” folders are now present.

At this point odrive will run through the folders and make sure everything is synced. Let it run (it may take a while) and it should eventually bring everything back in sync.

Important Note:
If it is Encrypted data, there actually isn’t a way to perform a local to local transfer of the cached data and shortcut Encryptor population on the new system. Because encryption is zero-knowledge and creates a unique, one-time key for each file, you cannot move the files inside the Encryptor folder from your local system to another local system. Really, the only way to populate a new computer is to download the files from the remote storage.

If you take the files from your Encryptor folder on your old computer and place them into the Encryptor folder on the new computer, all of the files will re-upload. This will happen because they will all be given new encryption keys.

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