Why are some of my files/folders missing from odrive? (Google Drive and others)

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Some of my Google Drive files and folders are not showing up in the odrive Desktop client. Why are these items not listed?

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UPDATE: We have released a new version that will convert the illegal characters into legal equivalents while still trying to maintain similarity to the original characters. Missing file and folders should be rarely seen after updating.

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Some sources (especially Google Drive) allow characters in file and folder names that are considered “illegal” on some operating systems. When this happens, odrive can’t create the file or folder on the local system, so it is not shown.

You should see these items listed in the “not allowed” section of the odrive menu.

Typically this is seen with the following characters:
':'
'/'
'\'
' ' (leading or trailing whitespace)
'?'
'<'
'>'
'|'
'"'
This can also happen in the files/folders have characters or patterns that fall into our “ignore” list: Sync Changes

If you remove those characters the files/folders will show in the odrive desktop client.

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Might it make sense to encode them in the destination filename rather than silently ignoring them (for example, convert hello:world to hello%{3A}world)? At a minimum, some kind of notification would prevent people like me thinking there’s a bug in odrive until coming across this (googling and form searching didn’t lead me to this page) before posting my own message.

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Hi @michael.m.wasser,
We will be making these occurrence much more visible and apparent in our next big release (no ETA to give on that right now). Apologies for the confusion in the meantime.

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Problem: Folder from Google Drive not displayed on desktop, but does show online (“AWWA/WEF”)
Solution: Remove backslash.

Turns out whitespace is not the only illegal character

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Glad you were able to sort it out @kbnewhart. The ‘/’ character is listed above in the list of common characters that can cause this issue:

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Will there be a solution that allows those files/folders to be seen and downloaded. My company has chosen to use ’ | ’ in most of their folder names. It is not within my power to have them rename all the folders.

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Hi @loki8833,
At this time there isn’t a way around this other than removing/replacing these characters.

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Glad to find this Solution. A client shared a folder with a “” in it so it wasn’t showing up.

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