Since Insync takes quite a while to scan on startup or resuming from pause, I thought I’d write a script to help me identify what folders are causing the biggest delay, and selectively delete / unsync them. If you’re using cloud storage for all your documents, then it’ll probably get cluttered with tons of unused files and folders over the years. I had over 130,000 files in my OneDrive folder, but with the help of the script, I brought it down to around 28,000. This has already improved scanning speed.
If you’re on Linux, it’ll be simple to use this script. I named it dirfind and put it in my local scripts folder. All it does is loop through the current folder and print out the total number of sub-files and sub-folders contained within it. You might be surprised with what you can prune away. I deleted some from my OneDrive entirely, but I simply unsynced most. If you’re using Windows, you can still use the script if you run it in Windows Subsystem for Linux, or rewrite it with equivalent PowerShell/batch commands.
# !/usr/bin/sh
if [ "$#" -lt 1 ]; then
echo "Usage: dirfind (directory path)"
echo "Example: dirfind ."
exit 1
fi
for file in $1/*
do
if [ -d "$file" ]; then
count=`find "$file" -type f -print | wc -l`
printf " %-6d %s\n" $count "$file"
fi
done | sort -k1,1nr
count=`find "$1" -type f -print | wc -l`
echo "Total in folder: $count"
Sample:
drak@pop-os:/media/drak/DATA/OneDrive$ dirfind .
7987 ./CloudMedia
7063 ./Documents
6090 ./Projects
3939 ./Pictures
3610 ./School
2 ./Desktop
0 ./Creative Cloud Files
Total in folder: 28693
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