Insync is broken with case sensitivity

I was trying to figure out why a document I have isn’t synced between my machines. As you would know, Windows is not case sensitive in file names. For whatever reason, on Machine A I have a folder “Documents”, and on machine B I have a folder “documents”. on machine C I have “Documents”, and then on machine D, which doesn’t run Insync, it runs Google’s own “Google Drive” it has both “Documents” and “documents (1)”. I have no idea how this situation arose, though it seems reasonable, given the evidence below, it’s because insync is broken. All these folders basically contain all the same files, except one new file I created in machine A is not synced anywhere. On the Google drive web site it has both “documents” and “Documents”, neither of which end up receiving the file.

When I go in the insync app on machine A, it lists both “documents” AND “Documents” in the list. There is a little green tick on “documents” and not on “Documents”. This makes no sense on Windows to have both, since you can’t have both on Windows. It does not appear the Google drive has this problem because it does not have any interface to display the folder hierarchy, it distinguishes them in the file system with the (1) addition to the directory name.

Despite insync seeming to be semi-unaware of my documents folder on machine A, in that it doesn’t sync stuff there, a change in that folder resulted in the file showing up in the Insync “Feed” screen as having changed. But seemingly doing nothing about it.

If I turn on two way sync for “Documents”, the little blue sync icon appears over the “Documents” folder in Insync never seems to go away. Nor does any other folder like *ocuments* ever appear.

On Machine D running Google Drive, everything works correctly as one would expect. I can create files in both Documents and “documents (1)” and they get synced up in the cloud to Documents and documents respectively.

On Machine B running insync, it has the little sync symbol on both Documents and documents, but documents exists nowhere on the file system.

I’m sure now that I’ve given you guys a heads up, you’ll be able to fix it in the next 5-10 years. Maybe on your 4th rewrite perhaps.

Hello, @xpusostomos. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Our engineer has been alerted about this bug and I am asking them to investigate your report. We’ll respond with an update here once we have more information on the matter.

Are all four machines running on Windows? Furthermore, could you walk us through how you set up Insync on each computer, specifically what sync location you chose for each machine (was it a new empty folder, was it an existing folder that mirrored your Google Drive cloud files, etc).

Thank you!

They are all windows machines, but at some points in the past I may have synced with Linux, but not now. The original setup would have been on Machine D with Google Drive app on d:/Google and that would have been the “master” so to speak, and the other machines setup as c:/Users/chris/Google with insync, and would have synced with the cloud. So very simple setup, just one folder drive ~/Google, and the directory in question is below that ~/Google/Documents. However that doesn’t mean that this particular sub directory has that origin. I don’t know how the directories got different cases, maybe I created it on the different machines before they could sync with different cases, just speculating. I don’t think I would have done that on purpose, but it’s a theory.

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Thanks so much for walking me through what the setup looks like.

Let me forward this to our engineers for further investigation, and I’ll update you if we’ll need more information while looking into this!

@xpusostomos Hi! Our engineer has investigated this and we were able to pin-point the root of the issue. Our engineers have lined up a fix, and we’re targeting to include it in an upcoming version. I can’t promise yet that it’ll be included in the next version (3.7.6), but it will be addressed soon! :crossed_fingers:

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I keep finding folders in my drive that start with a capital letter that have been duplicated with a (1) at the end. e.g. Employees … employees (1)… It seems that insync has corrupted my entire drive with this crap.

@xpusostomos I will follow this up with our engineers to see where the fix is in the pipeline.

Could you confirm that the “employees (1)” folder starts with a small letter but contain the same files as “Employees”? @xpusostomos