I am testing some of insync’s capabilities to sync “remote” folders to my google drive (cloud), and running into some fatal flaws in how InSync works.
If I select a folder on my NAS, say a folder called “SCANS”, and right click “add to InSync”. All works perfectly. That folder shows up in my google drive (cloud) and a .symlink file shows up in the designated “google drive” folder on my c: drive. So far so good. I can clearly see by looking at this folder that there is a link there. This tells me InSync is syncing the remote folder.
Within InSync, however, all I see is that the folder SCANS is being synchronized. I cannot tell within InSync if this folder is a folder located in my local Google Drive folder, or if it is a remote folder. THERE IS NO WAY TO TELL withing INSYNC. This is a problem I have reported before. But let’s move on.
If, within InSync, I de-select that folder (meaning I no longer want InSync to synchronize it), InSync then DELETES all the files from that folder on my NAS! Of course it leaves them on the Google Drive, and it leave the original folder structure intact, but the actual files on my NAS drive get deleted! In this instance, the folder called SCANS on my NAS is still there, but all the files within it were deleted by InSync.
Now, let’s say I go back into InSync and re-check the folder again to start synchronizing it again, because I want my files back on the NAS. Well, InSync doesn’t go back and put the files back where they belong. It creates a NEW folder called “SCANS” within my Google Drive folder and puts them there. Now this little operation has deleted my files from their original location, and placed them into my Google Drive folder.
The problem here is that InSync defaults to assuming that the desired “master” location for the files is in the cloud, not local. This should be a user selectable option somewhere. If it IS and I haven’t found it, please point me to that location.
InSync really needs to add some transparency and some options for the user to be able to 1) see where the folders are located that it is syncing, and 2) remember those folder paths, and 3) allow the user to determine what happens when a folder is de-selected (keep cloud files, keep local files, keep both, delete all, etc.), and 4) permanently delete a certain folder selection within InSync once the user decides to de-select it.