It seems that insync does not sync the multiple copies of a given file or folder. In Google Drive, one can use shit-z on a file or folder (web interface) to create an alias of that file or folder elsewhere - which is very useful because there are often several places to store a file. So this alias possibility is very interesting.
With the Google sync utility, the multiple copies are synced locally, which is the desired way of working (one wants to access files and folders in whichever location they are, and since they are synced, the multiple local versions are always kept in sync): http://note.io/1ypkpNR
@VincentKeunen Right now, we don’t support it (multiple parents), but there are already some users that requested it and we’ve already planned doing this.
Great. Any idea when this will work? When one uses shift-z (so very much useful…), it’s difficult to find files locally because they are not where you expect them to be. It’s also pretty difficult to go back to the web version, search for the file, look where it is (fortunately the web version of drive displays the multiple locations of a given file), then go back to your local disk and look in the other location. Another nuisance: if I want to archive the folder’s files in a unique zip, files are missing… :-/
I second this. I use this feature a lot. When a file in my Drive has several parent folders, searching for the file on my insync folder is painful. A possible implementation could be to create in each parent folder a symbolic link to a single (and hidden) sync’ed file, and setup your daemon to handle the various events properly (e.g. trash the file in the Drive whenever the last link is deleted locally).
Since there is a sym link feature on MacOS, Linux and Windows, I think it’s easier and safer to create link files with the OS specifics on each platform. It probably depends on how GDrive manages this internally.
Lots of use cases for this feature I’m sure. For me, I think I’d be able to selectively sync one top level folder that acts like the Starred view in Google Drive.
Actually, currently there is partial support for this - and it is buggy and creates a risk of data lost. Please bear with me as the explanation will need to be long.
We use the Shift+Z feature for a kind of selective sync. We have the following structure in GDrive for client projects:
We also have a folder called “Current projects” in the root directory. When we need to work on a project, we just Shift+Z it to the “Current projects” folder, which automatically syncs it.
You will alsk “Why don’t we use selective sync?” Because Selective sync would mean having to go down 2 extra folders (Projects folder and client folder) to access each project, and these are a lot of extra clicks.
You can’t really recreate this with symlincs without creating one for each project - which is not the ideal workflow.
Now to the porblem - while adding a folder to “Current projects” does get InSync to sync it down correctly, removing it (clicking the X next to the folder name in the sidebar in Google Drive) does not remove the local files and preservs the link. The files do not appear int he folder in the web interface, but remain on the hard drive. If you delete the local copy, this deletes all Gdrive copies of the file or folder.
Insync, please give an ETA for this base feature (multiple parents). Or, explain how I was supposed to guess from your homepage that this feature was missing in your product. Thanks.
