Raspberry Pi & NAS improvements

Feature requests
#1

Greetings,

first of all I want to say that I’m a big fan of Insync and that you’re doing a great job.

I mostly use Google Drive for managing my work on YouTube. I’m cooperating with other YouTubers on a daily basis and therefore need to share and manage files with them a lot.
In my current setup, I moved my local Google Drive folder to my NAS (Buffalo Linkstation), as it is running 24/7. My Raspberry Pi is also running 24/7 and therefore is being utilized to run Insync and manage my sometimes very time consuming up- and downloads to and from Google Drive.

After a few days of using this scenario, I’ve met some little bothers that I would love to see resolved.

1.) Please provide a Debian-Package for Raspberry Pi / ARM and maybe even a PPA for easier application management. The current portable version is not that far from a potential pseudo-native client, as far as I can tell. This would spare one the trouble of creating symlinks, making the commands get recognized by autocompletion, etc.

2.) Make it possible to run Insync automatically on startup instead of leaving the user to get that to work himself. My Raspy might be running 24/7, but power outages do occur and I’d rather have the application manage its own behavior instead of me fiddling with it.

3.) Please fix the recognition of file states on a NAS. It’s almost driving me nuts! If I throw a new file into the Google Drive folder on my NAS, Insync refuses to realize that by itself. Same with deletions and even changes on a filename or moving a file to a different folder. I always have to run pause_syncing and resume_syncing to make it realize the changes. That, on the other hand, causes issues with file movements and filename changes, as Insync then deletes the old version from Google Drive and reuploads that change instead of simply changing the metadata.
I’m close to letting a cronjob run pause_syncing and resume_syncing every five minutes, as I simply do not want to trigger every upload manually. I bought Insync for the exact purpose of not having to do that, after all.

FYI: My NAS is mounted via SMB and it and the Raspy are connected via LAN to the same network switch. File changes on the NAS are not recognized, no matter how long I’m waiting. (But downloads work like a charm. So… that’s something.)

I would really love to see some progress on these topics and will still happily use Insync in the future.

Best regards
Martin

1 Like
#2

thanks for the feedback and suggestions @Archivar, we appreciate it :slight_smile:

Let me tag our engineers so we can review and note these down @marte @lpugoy @jimperio @dipesh

#3

@Archivar: Thanks for reaching out.

  1. A package/repo for Raspberry Pi is not yet in the pipeline, but we’ve added it to our TODOs.
  2. A simple solution to run Insync at startup is to add an entry to your crontab. It would look something like @reboot insync-headless start.
  3. This sounds like the limitation with network drives when Insync is not notified of edits made by other users. The workaround for this case is to periodically call the force_sync command on the Insync folder. We’re still working on addressing this issue.
#4

Did you guys make any progress on a Raspberry Pi client? That would be really useful!

#5

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but any news on a Raspberry Pi PPA?

#6

Hi @xd1936,

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we’ve stopped supporting Raspberry Pi for now :slightly_frowning_face:

Not sure if we plan to support it again sometimes in the future, but as of now, our last working version is 1.3.17.