Major syncing issues when swapping drives

Bugs and issues
#1

Insync often encounters issues when I swap drives, and I haven’t mentioned it on here until now. I wrote this out in one of the short-answer segments on the recent feedback survey, but I figured it would be worth it to make this a forum post to bring attention to the problem.

There are two issues I get, both of which is infuriating and wastes a ton of time.

  1. Putting a drive with insync already installed into a new computer. This was VERY annoying. It happened to me twice. As soon as I logged in, Insync took a peek inside the drive and saw that D:/OneDrive was empty. And it started deleting EVERYTHING on the cloud. I had to spend over an hour in the OneDrive recycle bin, highlighting hundreds of items at a time and restoring them. Perhaps Insync should save the drive ID (instead of just the drive letter and name), and if it notices that the ID changed and there’s a lot of differences, it should alert the user before deleting everything on the cloud.

  2. Installing a fresh copy of Insync onto a computer that already has a OneDrive folder with all its contents, but the contents are out of date.
    This happened to me a week or two ago. I have a laptop that had not been used for several months, so the OneDrive folder is consequently several months out of date. And I reinstalled Windows on the laptop, leading to the need to reinstall Insync.
    Insync then immediately re-uploaded hundreds of files that I had since deleted, because it saw the files present on the outdated drive. Insync clearly didn’t attempt to compare the date it was deleted on the cloud with the last-modified/created date of the filed. If it did, then Insync would be able to easily tell that the files were deleted after the last time they were modified, and would see no need to re-upload them.
    Additionally, it uploaded and overwrote out-of-date versions of several of my files. Again, Insync clearly didn’t attempt to check the dates of the files in question.

All in all, these issues lead to a very frustrating experience whenever I swap a drive. I would greatly appreciate it if Insync was smarter (and more careful) with the file dates before committing to overwrite something.

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#2

Hi @Drakinite,

Thank you for providing more detail on what has been happening on your end. I’m so sorry you had to go through the trouble of restoring your directories! Let me forward this to our team so we can investigate the behavior and plan out improvements to prevent these things from happening.

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#3

Hi @Drakinite! This is Daryll, one of Insync’s engineers.

Thank you for the detailed report on the issues you’ve encountered!

I was able to consistently replicate #1 and added the proposed fix to the pipeline.

As for #2, I’m currently checking it out, and it would help us greatly if you can provide additional clarification on some parts of your report:

  • For the files that were since deleted, were they still in your OneDrive’s Recycle Bin when Insync did the re-upload?
  • For the overwritten out-of-date versions, did Insync overwrite the newer versions of existing files in the cloud with out-of-date ones from the local drive?
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#4

Thanks very much for getting back to me and fixing #1!

As for your questions:

  1. They probably were. I didn’t check, but I don’t believe I cleared the OneDrive recycle bin between the last time the drive was synced and the time the issue occurred.
  2. Yes. I don’t know whether all out-of-date files were overwritten, but definitely some were. If it helps, I can try to do more tests to see if I can replicate it again myself.
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#5

Thanks for the clarification, @Drakinite!

I was able to successfully (and consistently) replicate the scenarios that you mentioned, both the re-uploaded deleted files and the out-of-date version overwriting the newer one.

Let me share my findings:

  • Insync recognizes the old version of a since deleted file in the outdated drive as a new file without making any association to the since deleted file on the cloud, and hence uploads them to the cloud – from Insync’s perspective, it is an entirely new file. We don’t currently check if a file that is to be uploaded has been since deleted, basing on the idea that a file that has been newly added to a synced folder is most likely the result of some explicit user action, which isn’t the case when swapping out drives.
  • For the scenario of uploading out-of-date versions which result overwriting newer changes: Ideally, our conflicts feature should handle such events, but I’ve observed that it doesn’t in some specific scenarios.

We’ll be kicking off discussions on how to go about with these issues and eventually include the possible fixes in the pipeline as well.

Your inputs are invaluable and we appreciate all the help! Again, thank you.

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#6

Wonderful, Daryll! I’m glad that you were able to reproduce the issue. Thanks so much for listening to my input and for working on a fix. I really appreciate it.

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