Whole folders of active files in my OS trash

For the last couple weeks whole folders of files are ending up in my trash. I’m using the “put back” feature in Mac OS X to place the file back where it was originally but the last couple days it has ramped up quickly. Literally thousands; around 1,600 files were in my trash yesterday that were a mixture of active files. Things that SHOULD NOT BE TRASHED. I have no longer the patience to deal with this anymore and will be discontinuing use as soon as I’m out of this loop of trying to sync things back to their original location vs how fast Odrive trashes stuff.

Hi @john.long,
Thanks for reaching out on this.

If files are ending up in your OS trash, it indicates that odrive is picking up deletes of these items on the remote storage (the folders are reported as missing).

Can you tell me what storage source these folders are in?

If you send a diagnostic from the odrive tray menu and give me an example path, I may be able to see why odrive is picking up these folders as missing on the remote side.

That’s what I initially thought but then I checked Dropbox and it was active files that no one is deleting. I had to recover thousands of active files. I just sent a diagnostic report. Currently I’m waiting for it to finish syncing files back to their original locations. But every morning there’s another chunk of 100’s of files that should not be considered trash in my trash. This was happening for a coworker as well. He had to put everything on his desktop about 105gigs of files and disconnect from Odrive to prevent it from moving any more files to our trash.

My coworker tallied around 1,677 files were trashed, (same files for both of us). The folders for those files still existed but the files within each folder were trashed for some reason. So this doesn’t appear to be any person manually deleting files from Dropbox for example.

Thanks for the reply. I’m taking a look at the diagnostic now. Can you provide the full path to a folder where this was most recently happening?

Just to clarify, you are finding these files in the MacOS trash, and not the odrive trash, correct?

A few more questions:

  • When you look at the Dropbox web client, do you see that the files/folders are missing there, on the cloud side?

  • You can also check Dropbox events to look at the changes made, and when they were made: https://www.dropbox.com/events

  • Do you see the files/folders listed in the events?

  • Was your coworker also seeing items in the OS trash?

  • How many folks are sharing these same folders?

Here is just a quick rundown on odrive behavior:

  • When odrive detects that a file/folder is missing from the remote storage (a delete), it will remove the corresponding item from the odrive folder and place it in the OS trash.

  • When a file/folder is deleted locally, odrive will hold this delete in the odrive trash, and will not commit it until the user empties the trash (unless auto trash is enabled). This is to prevent inadvertent local deletes making it to the cloud without explicit user verification. More about that here: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#section--delete-existing-files-

Thanks!

To answer your questions in order:
Yes I am finding the files in the Mac OS trash.
Yes I have confirmed others have seen the files go missing in Dropbox.
Looking at the dropbox events for timespans when I saw the most files deleted it’s only showing around 1 or 2 files deleted on any 1 day. Not massive file deletions that seems to be occurring.
There are around 30 people sharing folders.
There are only 2 of us that have been using Odrive and each morning both of us would see massive amounts of files sitting in our trash.

Thanks @john.long,

Please see my comments/questions below. I am also going to PM you directly with some specifics from the diagnostic.

This includes those that are using the normal Dropbox client?
Did you also verify that the files are missing from the Dropbox web client, when you browse to the relevant locations?

If multiple people are seeing these files missing, then there has to be events showing something about these files. Is it possible they were moved or unshared, and not deleted?

I don’t believe Dropbox will put remotely deleted items in the trash, like odrive. As such I would only expect those using odrive to see these items in the OS trash. For those using the Dropbox client, these files would just be gone completely.

As stated above, these may be the result of moves or unshares, instead of deletes. If a file is moved into a folder that you do not have synced on your local machine (inside a folder represented by a .cloudf placeholder file), it will be dealt with as a local delete and put into the OS trash, since the move can’t be represented locally.

Keep in mind that odrive just reflects what the cloud is telling it. In this case it appears that Dropbox is telling odrive that these files are no longer where they were before.

Actually under “Deleted Files” on the left hand side I’m seeing bulks of files getting deleted by a new employee dropbox user at specific times that align with the activity I was seeing. So it appears this may not be a Odrive issue at all but rather someone trying to unsync from dropbox but inadvertently deleting chunks of files. Thanks for the heads up on the events log in Dropbox!

The only thing I can’t quite figure out is I saw some stuff from my personal drive getting moved to the trash as well but far less and I’ll need to confirm if I see that again. By and large the majority of missing files were on the work related Dropbox drive and I’m seeing specific file names that I recall recovering from my trash as deletes from his username.

Thanks for the update. I was still grinding through the diagnostic, which is not the funnest thing in the world :wink:

I’ll pause for now. I would like to know what paths you are seeing, so I can see if they correlate to what I am searching through, I’ll PM you on that.

Thanks!

Sure I’ll comment back if I’m seeing other weirdness outside of the evidence of deletes. Thanks again Tony for your help!

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