Handling insync-converted files on multiple computers

Bugs and issues
1

This isn’t necessarily a bug per se, but it’s behavior that I think still needs to be addressed.

I have a number of different linux boxes that I use in various contexts, some of which are actually installs on external backup hard drives (the idea is that if my computer dies, I can just grab a backup hard drive and boot from it on any computer and be back up and running where I left off, which I’ve done a number of times to great effect). The problem is that, since I’m backing up the files that insync has converted from gdoc to odf, insync sees those files on my back-up linux installation as new files, rather than conversions of files currently in drive.

It would be wonderful if there were some file metadata that you could write to these files that indicated that they were in fact synced and converted copies of files already on google drive. Insync would then find these backed up files, see that they correspond to gdocs, verify that nothing has changed, and leave them alone (or sync, depending on their state, of course).

Every so often I have to go into gdrive and clean out all the duplicate copies of files because of this.

Thanks again,
Kael

2

Hi @Kael_Shipman1 have you checked our CONVERT feature in our app? Can you try that out and let me know if selecting to not convert Google Drive files helps out your issue?

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Thanks!

3

Thanks for the reply,

However, the conversion of google docs to and from ODF is one of insync’s most valuable features! I would never opt to leave my google docs in google docs form.

What I’m looking for instead is a portable way to identify a converted ODF doc as “the same” as a given google doc, so that if I copy that ODF doc to a different computer and synchronize, it doesn’t upload that doc but instead recognizes it as a doc that it doesn’t need to download from Google Drive.

I know that’s kind of a convoluted reply, so if it’s still not very clear, just let me know and I’ll try to draw a diagram.

Thanks,
Kael