Safe Insync backups - Linux Version

#1

I’m using Linux and because Google Drive is very difficult to use in the browser, especially dealing with lots of files at once, I decided to set up a file server in our office using so my colleagues could just share files on our network instead of uploading and downloading everything from Drive.

But I made a mistake and started syncing our Drive (320 GB of data) to the 256 GB SSD in my Linux computer, instead of the the 3TB drive I wanted it to sync to. When I came back from lunch the 256 GB SSD (which probably had 100 GB free when I started syncing) was full. I realised my mistake and switched the sync destination to the 3 TB drive instead. Everything seemed fine at that point.

I then deleted the sync folder that was on my SSD. This may have been part of the problem.

Later in the day I opened the Bin on drive and saw that it was full of files, many of which with hindsight I did think shouldn’t be there, but as Drive doesn’t show much info I figured maybe they were old versions. I don’t like my trash to have files in whether on drive or on my computer so I deleted them all. This is where things went very very bad.

A few hours later I needed a file and the folder which I had seen syncing to the 3TB drive was missing. I went to Drive to find it and it was gone!!! ALL of our company files for the past 12 months had been permanently deleted!!!

I have two questions.

  1. Can I set up Insync on two computers to ensure that I always have a backup? ie have Drive syncing to my computer in the office and also syncing to my computer at home?

  2. Is there a way to make syncing one way only. In otherwords sync from Drive to the computer but not the other way, so if a file is deleted from Drive it is NOT deleted from the computer. I’d like to do a full normal sync to the office computer and just a backup sync to my home computer.

Thanks.

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#2

The same happens here too when I tried to sync my second computer.
Luckily I had another backup otherwise I had lost 3 years of programming.
I now only sync one computer, and make other backups by hand because I don’t trust insync anymore.

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#3

Despite their formal apology, Insync has yet to do anything about these huge problems. Same happened to me and tens of other users. I wonder at what point they start to talk to their lawyers about the potential lawsuits that could emerge from selling a program that deletes peoples databases.

#4

Hi @seanchk,

My deepest apologies for what happened. :frowning: It could be that Insync was still working with moving the files to the correct directory. Do you mind confirming if you already sent the logs.db and out.txt files to support@insynchq.com? This would help us with our investigation as to why the files were sent to your System Trash.

To answer your questions–

  1. Yes, you can setup Insync on two computers. Any changes you make on computer 1 will sync to computer 2 and vice versa.
  2. We have not yet developed one-way sync, but this is a feature commonly requested. Our product team is currently looking into this so we can include it in the pipeline. :slight_smile: