Yesterday, I had a non-boot/non-OS drive fail on a Windows 10 desktop that was using Insync. No big deal, I thought. Upon installing a new drive and booting the computer, Insync proceeded to delete all of the files off the cloud rather than sync back down to the new drive as expected. I stopped it as soon as I realized it, but hundreds of files had already been deleted. I was also using Spanning backup to provide an extra layer of protection, but unfortunately it also didn’t work as expected due to a user account setting.
Long story short, I could not do a point in time restore from Spanning because files had multiple ownership in this shared directory. As a result, the files are backed up across multiple accounts (the file owners) and do not have any way to identify their original location. Had I checked “backup shared” files under each account on Spanning, a point in time would have been possible. I am now using the activity feed to manually restore each file. I also had to uninstall insync, delete all config files from the user directory and reinstall to get this working correctly (downloading instead of deleting).
In conclusion, be very careful with insync when replacing a failed drive and always double check your cloud backup provider to make sure you understand how to restore large scale directory structures. I definitely have plenty of this to blame on me, but I am disappointed that insync does not handle this issue a little more gracefully.
I hope this helps others avoid this issue in the future.
Kent