OFFICIAL: Insync 3 Formal Statement

#1

Hello everyone!

Since Insync 3’s release, the team has received numerous reports regarding its performance, stability and lack of features.

We’re aware of all the issues reported and we’ve been working on them relentlessly. We pride ourselves in our work and it upsets us to see the number of affected users.

On that note, we acknowledge the mistakes we committed and we apologize.

First, the migration of 1.5 users to Insync 3 was botched. We should’ve slowly rolled it out until we figured out what worked best for our users instead of relying on our limited onboarding variations for testing. In addition, we should have made the upgrade to Insync 3 reversible.

Second, we lacked clarity on Insync headless. Rebuilding Insync 3 from the ground up meant we had to let go of certain features like headless (which a minority of customers used), because we are a very small team. At the time, we thought it was a reasonable tradeoff since headless functionality is available on 1.5, which can still be used today. We should’ve made this clearer instead of encouraging everyone to update immediately.

“So why did you release Insync 3 the way you did?”

Besides the financial necessity to release, we thoroughly tested Insync 3 (over 6 months) and thus were confident it was ready. While the initial version of Insync 3 lacked feature parity to Insync 1.5, we thought the addition of OneDrive, one of our most requested features, was enough to release.

In hindsight, we should’ve released it incrementally among our existing users to test the migration process and the app’s syncing performance first.

We know it’s too late now and the mistakes happened so the best we can do now is to acknowledge them, analyze what we could do better and apply it to future releases.

We understand it doesn’t solve the issues you are having now but…

We have shifted our focus into improving Insync 3’s reliability and performance.* We are also exploring adding a headless version (no ETA) for Linux users but we don’t know if it will be packaged into Insync 3 or if it will be a separate product but either way, 1.x users will be grandfathered (i.e. no additional payment for headless functionality).

We appreciate the feedback everyone has been giving and we’ll be needing a lot more of it to make Insync the best sync app ever.

Thanks for your continued support and happy holidays!

Team Insync

P.S. We’re also reaching out to affected users as our devs work on fixing reported issues. If you’re experiencing issues you can post below and we’ll get back to you after the holidays.

*A few months ago, we decided to add Dropbox support so that will continue.

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Insync plagued with bugs for too long. Alternatives?
Can't sync Team Drive
Insync 3.0.23 bugs with thunar and syncing on Xubuntu 18.04.3
#2
Formal statement on Insync3 debacle needed
#3
#4

One important point in the formal statement is that upgrading to insync 3 is not mandatory. However, at this point, the GUI version of 1.5.7 deb available for Ubuntu does not work in the latest stable version of the OS (19.10). Only the headless works, but I would prefer to run the GUI version as it warns me of problems during sync. Please, create a Ubuntu 19.10 deb for 1.5.7.

The problem I am seeing was already reported, see

#5

yeah the onedrive logic is flawed… existing customers are already reliant on the existing feature set working, and due to the nature of data sync/backup it has to be rock solid “always” to be useful

i’m sure some percentage of existing customers would appreciate the addition of onedrive and some new customers would come on board, but the thing i paid money for and use every day is lifetime google drive support :sweat_smile:

if the situation gets worse (e.g. the headless support goes away before the new GUI is rock solid with 1:1 feature parity) i’ll probably ask for a refund and move on - i really don’t want to though, i’d much prefer to have access to a working product from a well established team!!

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#6

My Insync client (v3.0.25.40643) was stuck at using 100% of one CPU thread, and it appeared to not be syncing anything. Suddenly I got a bunch of error messages, all saying: “Unexpected error doing AddLocalGDItem: Invalid Credentials”. When I retried I got the same errors after about >=15s. The CPU usage remained just as high after I paused the syncing so something was definitely wrong. It was like that for at least 30 minutes before I restarted Insync and it started working again with a lower CPU usage.

On a side note, the error messages are cleared once I pause the syncing. Is this the intended behavior? Because it seems kind of odd.

Also, since I updated Insync to version 3.x I have started getting an error about a filename being too long. Have you started imposing a limit on filename length? I understand that it’s weird to have very long file names, but it’s also kind of weird to put a limit on users that their cloud service doesn’t have (in this case Google Drive). :confused:

EDIT: Some features I really miss from version 1.5:

  • Being able to see if everything is synced, if syncing is in progress or if it is paused just by looking at the icon in the top bar (running Ubuntu).
  • Being able to see how many files are left to be synced.

And lastly, can’t you let the user select how many files are allowed to be synced simultaneously? I may be wrong about this, but if you have a ton of small files then you may have a lot to gain by letting more than 12 files sync simultaneously.

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#7

One of my key use cases for which I depend on Insync was the ability to locally copy and paste google type documents (ie. copy a document, or folder with google documents from one location and paste this to a new location and then have it synced back to drive). This works fine in 1.5 but does not work with Insync3 (I have had several communications with Mia re this issue, in the last the following was stated “This issue will be looked into! I was able to replicate and get the insight of our engineer”). Any update?

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#8

We agree that syncing should always be solid and reliable first and foremost. Insync has always had that mindset and we understand how crucial this is for our users.

Thanks for sharing! The feedback’s useful for the team. :slightly_smiling_face:

#9

This is an existing issue and our team is currently working on it! :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks for the heads up and for sharing your use-case.

#10

Just wanted to say thanks for acknowledging the problems with version 3 and I am tentatively relieved to hear that you will be focusing on improving the reliability!

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#11

Agreed. It is said that many people requested OneDrive support. But that doesn’t include the people like me (and maybe you) who bought this program for Google Drive support. So while version 3 was released to seduce a bunch of new OneDrivers wanters, it was a dynamite catastrophe for the regular users.

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#12

Hi Gregory,

A philosopher once said that, “To know and not to do is not to know.” So when you say that you “agree” and “understand” how crucial this is, are you spinning deceitful PR or are you actually knowing what this means? Tens if not hundreds or thousands of your users have suffered catastrophic data loss from the wanton decisions of the Insync team. Knowing this would imply action. So far, no action!

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#13

Hey @shinemacs,

I do know how crucial this is to our users and that’s why we don’t take this issue lightly. Improving the app’s reliability and performance is our team’s current priority and we’ll be sharing the fixes here on our forums.

If you’re experiencing issues and haven’t contacted our Support Team yet, email them at support@insynchq.com with the necessary details (log files, OS, app version, and steps to replicate the issue).

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#14

@Gregory,

The official statement you wrote says that the team would like to add headless support, but that there is no timeline. So basically this is the same as saying “no, we currently are not working at all on a headless version, and we are not going to start anytime soon.” Happiness ambassadors only speak in Fake Happy language, though. I wish you guys would just say what you mean instead of trying to be pleasant (it is not pleasant, by the way, to not have issues resolved week after week after week).

The official statement stated about zero that we didn’t know before. Insync is pushing forward with Version 3, which is and remains a complete and utter disaster. The weeks go by and no changes from your team. It feels like no one is at work.

What about version 1.5.7 (insync-headless) — when is its next update/release going to be?

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#15

Hey @shinemacs,

We said we’ll explore adding a headless version in the future and there’s no current timeline since our team’s focused on improving Insync 3’s reliability and performance. We’re a small team and dividing our efforts will not be effective in solving problems.

We apologize for the mistakes we’ve made throughout Insync 3’s release and we are working on several bugs and issues. If you’re experiencing any specific issue, you can let us know and we can share our progress on it.

1 Like
#16
#17

Hi,

Thank you, but no thank you. Since the last release I made my coworkers to buy Insync and what a mistake. Random files being deleted withou notice (!), duplicates were popping out on the other hand. A total headache. I was rooting for you, but this changed my mind, going back to Drive File Stream.

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