Oh my god, you deleted everything

Bugs and issues
#1

I have been in the process of getting my business untangled from InSync due to the myriad issues I’ve encountered in v3, but another company I am partnered with required me to set up InSync with the GSuite account they provided me so I had to get it running on a workstation at their office which had previously been synced to my own account.

Today I tried to uninstall & reinstall InSync at their office because v3.1.1 was having UI errors that resulted in nothing drawing to the interface. During the process, InSync… deleted everything. Or almost everything. I have tens of thousands of files in there. Had.

What the hell is this? I uninstalled InSync, then deleted the directories containing all information related to it – not the directories inside the synced folder, but the whole root folder from the drive, in which InSync controlled only one directory, 2 levels down. The last time I reinstalled InSync this was what I had to do to make it work at all, seeing the old folders made it unable to sync anything until I started over from scratch.

Then I reinstalled InSync so I could hook it up to the new (completely different) account, located in a new directory. I guess despite uninstalling InSync and removing all folders associated with it (WHILE IT WAS UNINSTALLED), InSync somehow thought what I REALLY wanted to do was dump all of my data from the cloud. In the 30 seconds after it started up it ruined my whole drive.

I’m not kidding, I had 8 years of assets & documents from my business in there. Most of it is backed up elsewhere but some of the ongoing projects are only partially backed up as of last week, and even then restoring that much data from backups will be a nightmare.

Restoring from the Trash on Google Drive did nothing, it brought back some of the root folders but none of the data more than one or two levels down. I was told by GSuite support that restoring data via date range from the GSuite Admin Console may take several days to complete and they can’t be sure it will work for everything, so the jury is out there.

I’m not really looking for support, I doubt you can do anything. I just can’t believe this. I was going to take a break from InSync for 6 months while your team worked out some of the v3 problems, but now I don’t even know what to say, I’m just in shock.

1 Like
Option to ask user before deletion (To prevent massive unwanted deletion)
#2

Hi @fifthlegion,

We can only imagine how you must be feeling about what happened, and our team would like to apologize for this.

If you don’t mind, may I know what you were pertaining to when you deleted directories “containing all information” related to Insync, as well as “deleting the whole root folder from the drive”? This would help our engineers see clearer picture of what exact directories were deleted during the uninstallation so we can investigate this further.

Before re-installing Insync, did you remove the account first, then proceeded to delete the associated program files?

Again, we would like to sincerely apologize for this. If it’s possible to provide further information and logs, you may email me at support@insynchq.com either in a new email thread, or the existing ones you have with me.

#3

“Nice” user story …

I had same experience 6 months ago, but in my case without above mentioned terrible consequences (I am doing weekly Google Drive backup on my external HDD).

So, Insync is still definitely not matured product, and all Insync (v3) users are strongly advised to do proper backup of all data, because Insync is not enough reliable!!!

#4

users are strongly advised to do proper backup of all data always regardless of software, especially for business matters. having a disaster recovery strategy is a must for modern business.

#5

@sinidavihu I have a two-tiered strategy that covers everything that can realistically be backed up on a daily basis with my resources. Data loss isn’t really the core of the problem for me here.

After calming down and assessing what GSuite was able to recover my permanent losses in this incident amount to:

1.) Some parts of recent work on active projects. Annoying, but nothing I can’t replace.

2.) Many Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. I have PDF “hard copies” for all but the most frequently updated docs but I’ve never gotten the live .gsheets files backed up successfully, they seem to be online only. Very unpleasant, but I can rebuild what I’ve lost with some patience.

3.) Quite a bit of time sorting through backups, re-uploading thousands of files and reorganizing the data GSuite did recover but dumped into bizarre locations without the original directory structures. I expect to keep finding misplaced or missing files for a long time.

4.) Confidence in the product. I was a very happy v1 customer, to the point that I evangelized quite a bit, but v3 has just been a series of headaches for me, and now this.

To elaborate for @mia :

I have multiple InSync accounts mounted on this machine to a common root directory. For example:

Y:\GoogleDrives\InSync\<account1_name>\<synced files>
Y:\GoogleDrives\InSync\<account2_name>\<synced files>

After uninstalling InSync I deleted the GoogleDrives\ directory leaving nothing but an empty Y:\

I’ve encountered a recurring bug in v3 with stuck file queues during the initial sync and my hack to solve it has been to delete everything InSync-related then start over. So after deleting the directories from Y:\ I also deleted the lingering InSync files in my C:\Users\<username>\AppData\ directories.

Then I installed InSync from a fresh download.

No – and I can see that is probably why it deleted so much of my data before I could break the connection. I was surprised to see it still had my account info after reinstalling.

Actually, I just thought of this: I had 2 accounts synced to this system. Why did InSync retain info about one but not the other?

Do with all of that what you will – I’m not looking for something to get “fixed” for me here and I don’t think I’m blameless in creating this situation. I was trying to hack my way around bugs with behavior not intended by the developers. Still, I expected the product to handle errors like a missing root directory a little more elegantly.

#6

really happy to hear this, i might have stated the obvious in my previous post but i had to… sorry.

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#7

So the real question here is where was that account info stored? Registry?

I have discovered if you delete a base folder at anytime regardless of Insync being installed or not, you risk Gdrive mass deletion.

A very simple temporary fix for this until bugs are worked would be a warning of some sort on detection of certain deletions about to take place.

Also, in the latest version I discovered Insync could be running and NOT show in the tray. So I thought it was shut down but it was running and caused me issues.

I love their concept, but in all honesty I am now concerned about coding skills.

I’m still hoping.

#8

I also hope things come around. Significant regressions like v3 are really jarring but I try to stop myself from judging developers without knowing what’s going on for their team internally, so I will continue to give InSync the benefit of the doubt.

v1 was really a life changing product when I found it years ago. Drive File Stream has improved enormously since then and now there are only a handful of killer features InSync has (simultaneous multi-user syncing being #1) but I’d still prefer it over Google’s own products if I could trust it.

The licenses are permanent so they’ve got the same amount of money from me regardless of my satisfaction level. Hopefully the current push for working remote / from the cloud creates some extra sales to keep pushing things forwards.

#9

Yes, and the other big feature I like is doc conversion. That’s my #1. Although I also don’t want to judge devs, how hard can it be to code a warning if an entire folder is going to be deleted in the cloud?

And also, where did it get your account info after an uninstall? Why should you be required to delete the account in InSync before uninstall? An uninstall routine should delete everything. Or some ask if you want configuration data deleted, to which you would have answered no. These sort of things baffle me!! I am an engineer so these sorts of things really frustrate me.