Installed Sync on new computer but same external HD, why is it re-uploading everything?

#1

I’ve seen similar posts on here but I can’t find the exact issue I’m having.

  • Had an old macbook with a fully sync’d external HD
  • Connected that external HD to the new macbook
  • Installed insync on the new macbook
  • Pointed it to the existing directory to sync to

It is re-uploading everything from my external HD to Google. Thankfully, as far as I can tell, it’s not creating any duplicates, but it’s modifying all the files in some way because the web interface for Google Drive shows that all of my files have been recently edited.

Any way to avoid this?

#2

It might not have seen that the old external hard drive is the same as the one you have on your new computer. Any suggestions @marte?

#3

Hello @damonll are the “edits” different or is it just the same content? You can check the revision history of a file to verify. Do you know if the files in the external HD had their timestamps changed?

#4

I’ve once had the same situation and managed to modify the backup of the insync database on my old computer to match the paths on my new machine. It took some tinkering to get a grasp of whats happening in the database but i could finally manage to convince it not to synchronize everything again.

#5

@marte and @jaduenas: thanks so much for the response, and apologies for getting back to late!

I’m looking at the version history and don’t see anything strange. For instance, here’s a quick screenshot of the GDrive web UI, showing I edited “getExecutors.js” today:

gdrive-ui

Here is the web UI showing that file’s history, as you can see last modified time was in August. Not sure why it would think it was updated today.

history

Directories whose files are being re-sync’d have dates ranging from early 2017 to a few days ago.

Anything else I can provide?

Also - it’s close to completing it’s sync. I haven’t seen any duplicates yet, so other than the time it’s taking to re-sync, doesn’t seem to be a real problem. Hopefully it’s not impacting my Google Photos which I sync w/ GDrive as well, haven’t checked that.

Thanks!