First of all, I’m not sure whether this is the correct tag. Feel free to move this post around.
Yesterday, I’ve had some issues with InSync’s Dropbox capabilities. These were happened because of both user error, and lack of communication from InSync UI. I’ll try to summarize this as much as I can, please bear with me.
I’m in a big migration towards cloud, mostly Dropbox, and to be able to backup and out-of-tree sync Dropbox, I use InSync. Yesterday, I tried to sync a 12G folder, with 23495 files and 4151 subfolders in it.
This is what happened:
First, I synced the folder it into the wrong folder. I immediately pressed unsync. As a result downloading stopped, sync progress bar closed, unsync button disappeared. So it unsynced, right? No.
Considering it stopped, I deleted the folder, and InSync remote deleted all that data. I recovered them from my Dropbox trash, and I believe I didn’t lose any files, but it was a frightening experience.
I re-synced that folder today, and it went smooth. Then, InSync deleted 25 or so files from that folder. I again recovered them. It’s fine for ~6 hours. Nothing bad happened. However, I’ve found out that InSync’s UI is sometimes very out of sync with what it’s actually doing. I had no way of knowing what it’s doing during some states of syncing.
- I have no information when InSync is starting syncing a new folder. I can only look to logs inside the DB, see my disk activity, or network traffic. InSync says nothing to me. It stays put.
- I have no information when InSync is unsyncing a large folder. Will you gonna download everything and delete? Are you working on cancelling something? Nothing. It stays put. Maybe it asked me to wait until some time, I’d not have deleted the folder, and didn’t had to recover 25K files from my Dropbox trash.
- Why it deleted those 25 files? I didn’t delete them. They weren’t in my local trash either. Do I have little gnomes in my computer which do things behind me? I don’t know.
As InSync is getting more features and used with bigger volumes, the areas it needs more work becomes clear. It’s a very reliable tool for OneDrive and Google Drive, but with Dropbox, things are not as rock-solid, for example. During long operations, InSync doesn’t give information. A simple spinner with some summary information would be nice.
So, all in all, Dropbox’s trash saved me yesterday from some possibly serious file loss.
Please consider this as a constructive criticism.
