Will odrive client sync again the same files already uploaded?

Hello
I have the oDrive client currently synchronizing about 30 GB of data from my PC to a G.Drive account.

Now I made a backup copy of what I have uploaded on that G.Drive account to another G.Drive account, I used an API script which pretty much cloned all my files & folders from Account 1 to Account 2.

Now my question is…if I want to switch for whatever reason the oDrive sync from Account 1 to Account 2, will it recognize the cloned data or it will start the process all over again?
(I got only 1 Megabit speed in upload so 30 GB takes quite some time to transfer)

Cheers
Alyssa.

You will not have to transfer the files again but there are a few steps to do it right so it won’t try to transfer, remove, or see them as conflicts.

So on your PC in the odrive folder, you have Gdrive-1 with all the files locally and synced to Google.
As you said, you have already cloned the files to account 2, so when you link the 2nd Google account to odrive, all of the files that are already in Google Drive for that 2nd account will suddenly appear on your computer as odrive .cloud placeholder files.

Create a temporary folder on your desktop. Open the GDrive-1 folder, select all, and move them to the temp folder.
odrive will see the files disappear and will popup a window saying that all the files are now in the Trash Bin. Click the odrive menu and select the option to “empty the trash and sync the deletes”. This will delete all of the files on Google Drive in account 1. Since you moved the local files, those will not be deleted.

When it has finished emptying the trash, quit the odrive app.
Log into your account on odrive.com and unlink Account 1.

Open the GDrive-2 folder, select all of the .cloud placeholder files, and delete them.
Go back to the temp folder, select all, and move the files into the GDrive-2 folder.
Launch the odrive app. When it starts up, it will compare the GDrive-2 folder to the remote Google Drive. Since all of the files will be complete in both locations, it will simply see that everything is in sync.

If for some reason there is a missing file on either side, odrive will either push it up to Google or will add a .cloud file on your PC. and if for some strange reason any files are not actually the same, odrive will flag it as a conflict and keep both versions. It won’t ever delete or overwrite a file.

I hope that wasn’t too confusing.

1 Like

Hello
Thanks for the reply, I’m not going to do the switch between the accounts yet but now I have a more precise idea of how to do it; thanks.

Just want to chime in on what @Smudge wrote to add a couple of points. (Thanks for contributing @Smudge! Much appreciated)

I would recommend you do not delete anything in Account 1 until you have verified that absolutely everything is synced in Account 2. It sounds like this may have already been done, but I just wanted to punctuate it.

@Smudge hit most of the major points. My recommended steps tend to be overly cautious and would be something like this:
This assumes you have all of the data in Account 1 downloaded locally in odrive and all placeholders for Account 2 in odrive.
This also assumes that you duplicated the data from the root of Account 1 into the root of Account 2. If that is not the case then the steps will need to be modified to account for the proper location of the Account 1 data in Account 2.

  1. Unsync Account 2 in odrive so the whole link is turned into a placeholder file (Account 2.cloudf)
  2. Right-click on Account 2.cloudf, make sure both of the checkbox options are not selected, and slide the slider all the way to the left for “Nothing”. Then click the big silver sync button. This will sync only the root level of Account 2 as placeholders
  3. Close odrive
  4. Move the data from Account 1 into Account 2. Since the data should already be in there, the moved data should parallel the placeholders visible. They will exist alongside each other until odrive is started again (you will see .cloud and .cloudf files with the same names as the moved-over data in the root of Account 2)
  5. Go to https://www.odrive.com/account/myodrive and unlink Account 1
  6. Start odrive

What will happen:

  • odrive will remove the Account 1 link
  • odrive will see all of the “new” files in Account 2 and start syncing.
  • odrive will recognize that the data added is the same data that is already in the cloud and start green-checking the data. It will also automatically remove the placeholder files, since they have been replaced with their corresponding local data.

After all of this is done, you can go into the Google Drive web interface on Account 1 and delete the data from there, if you choose to do so.