*._XXXXXX and .ds_store files

I Have a Question
1

I am hosting an FTP server, with clients connecting to it via oDrive. The apple file system generates these hidden files, and oDrive is syncing them to the server from the clients. Are these files necessary to sync? Is there a way to stop this?

2018-02-22_17-02-25
2018-02-22_17-02-25.png1215Ă—304 122 KB

2

Hi @wh33ln,
odrive is actually supposed to ignore those types of files. If you are seeing that odrive is actively uploading those, can you send a diagnostic from the client that is doing that so I can take a look?

Here is a list of our ignored files/patterns: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#section--ignore-list-

3

@Tony, I just now sent diagnostics for one user. But this is happening from several users.

4

Hi @wh33ln,
I can’t find any examples of uploading .DS_Store files in the diagnostic, and I can’t reproduce that behavior. I looked at the code and it shouldn’t be possible to upload those from the local system.

The ._ files are a different matter. For SFTP uploads, the file is “staged” and then renamed once the upload has completely finished. This prevents partially uploaded files from appearing complete and it also prevents partial files from blocking re-attempted uploads.

There isn’t a good way to clean these temporary files up from the odrive side if an upload is aborted in the middle, so you will see these files hang around. The examples in the screenshot are all files that are on the larger side (450MB+), so these are probably large files that users were attempting to upload and were aborted in the middle, for one reason or another.

You could run a periodic cleanup routine on the server to go through and delete these files (._ files older than 48 hours, for example).

5

@Tony I’m not sure I understand completely, but if you are telling me that it is working as designed I am fine with that. I just dont want oDrive uploading/downloading and taking up bandwidth on things that do not matter.

Sounds to me like you are saying the filename is “._XXX” until the upload is complete and then it renames to the proper file name when complete.

If I have those temporary files piling up on the server, are they just incomplete uploads that never got a chance to complete?

6

Hi @wh33ln,
That is correct. The ._xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx files (38 characters, total) are the staging files. You should be able to safely clean those up if they are older than 48 hours. Chances are very good that nobody has been trying to upload that one file for more than 48 hours and those are interrupted upload attempts.

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