Can Insync provide a full file list without downloading all files?

#1

Hello,

Our company uses Google Shared Drives as our company file management system, and most employees are using the Google Drive for Desktop software on windows, and have had great success with this.

I have a new employee that requested to run linux, and I am happy to support his OS choice. I was hoping that insync would be able to provide a solution that works similar to Drive for Desktop, where a local directory structure is available and lists all the files, but only ever has a small portion of the total file structure synced at a single time. Many of the files are kept for historical and documentation purposes but are not being used on a daily basis, so having his computer have a local copy is not only impossible on the 512GB drive in his machine, but is not particularly useful even if the space was available.

Is there any way to allow him to locally browse the directory structure and look at files (and basic metadata) as though all of the files are synced, but not actually keep all the files downloaded locally, and selectively sync files through either a right click menu option, or automatically sync a file when he attempts to open it? Preferably this would include the ability to set a cache size for storing the actively synced files, and then removing synced files that have not been opened in a while to make room for new files that are trying to be opened/synced.

I have not been able to find such a feature in the settings, but I figured I might be missing something.

Thanks!

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#2

Hi @KroniK907 :slight_smile:

Thank you for reaching out and for supporting your employee in his OS choice. Right now, only the synced files (as indicated by a green check) are shown locally on the file manager. The rest can be viewed via the Insync app UI.

Could you let me know if launching the Insync app UI and browsing files via this method addresses the situation?

#3

Not particularly. It essentially makes insync about as functional as using the google drive web app and manually downloading files, since there is no way to open the files from the insync browser. If you turned your insync browser into a full file browser that works as an alternative to nemo or similar, then that could be a solution but having to open insync, browse to the file, start the sync and then browse to that file again in nemo to be able to open it, feels just as time consuming and inefficient as downloading and uploading manually through the google drive web app.

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#4

@KroniK907 I understand, and thank you for taking the time to write to us! I have forwarded this to our product team as feedback for improvement :slight_smile:

#5

Thank you for your replies. Just to let you know, our employee has chosen to switch back to windows, citing the lack of google drive support as his main reason. I know both our employee and myself would greatly appreciate a solution that would replicate the Google Drive for desktop functionality, or the Dropbox Smart Sync etc.

I hope your teams will eventually be able to create a feature like this as it would make linux a much more usable option in our office, and we would be happy to pay full business license pricing for this feature.

Thank you for your responses and I hope we can work with you in the future!

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#6

I will discuss this with them and update our users when a feature like this is in development :slight_smile: