Is there a way for insync to sync only files that I add to my local drive folder, but not files I delete?
It is not very comforting or safe, if I accidently delete a folder on my local drive that it could be deleted on my cloud drive.
Hi! Right now, there is no specific configuration to handle such a use case.
If there is an accidental deletion, one can check the computer’s trash folder and restore those files so it gets resynced to the cloud.
I would find this very useful. I often want to upload files to Google Drive without having to keep a local copy, but currently the only way to do that with Insync is to sync with a staging folder on Drive, then move the files to a non-synced folder via the Drive browser interface. This means having to remember to do the move after the sync finishes. Being able to designate certain folders as “upload only” (or perhaps “append only”) would make this much easier.
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Hi @POC,
Our 1-way sync may address the “upload only” preference you mentioned, but not the part about not having a local copy.
I can bring this up with our team as a feature request 
Hi! Just wanted to ask about the update regarding this feature.
This was a very prominent feature in Google’s Backup and Sync app to use GDrive fully as a backup (especially for those of us who always have a shortage of hard drive space) but now with Google forcing out Backup and Sync and forcing users with Google Drive Desktop, which is a complete nightmare, lots of us are scrambling to find alternatives. So this feature would be greatly appreciated ontop of the the 1-way sync feature. Thank you so much!
hello and thanks for your request.
the 1-way sync feature doesn’t propagate deletes from target to source. does that work for you?
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Hello and thank you for the reply. The problem mentioned is mostly that we can’t use 1-way sync in the way we used to use Google’s Backup and Sync that it never deletes both copies, meaning that the system wouldn’t delete the copy at target if we deleted it from source.
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Yes, clearly insync in its current form should not be used instead of a real backup because it is so happy to delete files both on the cloud and locally, while real backup must never delete anything.
I just synced a large folder, but when local drive was unmounted - insync immediately deleted everything from the cloud. I do not need such “sync”, but some other backup solution.
Hello @jhnlmn!
I’m so terribly sorry for that chaos. I can’t imagine what you had to do in order to recover your files.
May I ask if you could email your logs to support@insynchq.com? Ideally, unmounting a local drive should not lead to any deletions; it should only be detected as a missing base folder. If you could send your logs, please include the following files:
- logs.db
- out.txt
Thank you!
No, sorry, the log is full of sensitive file names and I cannot send them.
But I can see it is full of messages like:
INFO 2023-10-16 16:20:54,524 [fsimpl:move_to_trash:91] Moving to trash: …
INFO 2023-10-16 16:20:54,525 [syncwork:trash_item:5344] Deleting to trash …
OSError: [Errno 18] Invalid cross-device link: …
INFO 2023-10-16 16:21:21,771 [syncwork:_remove:5381] Permanently deleting file: …
INFO 2023-10-16 16:21:21,771 [fs:delete_reg:270] Permanently deleting: …
ERROR 2023-10-16 16:21:21,778 [syncwork:_remove:5365] While moving to trash
So, it looked like it deleted cloud backup first and then deleted the local storage or vice versa.
And this behavior is correct for “sync” like of system, like insync.
The point of this post is that “sync” is not “backup”,
“sync” should delete files when they disappear on the other side, like that happen with me,
but a real “backup” must never delete files without explicit permission
and insync is not designed and cannot be used as “backup”
Hi @jhnlmn,
Reliable backup solutions, as you have described, will be revisited by Insync in the future. We are not sure yet where this is in the pipeline but I’m happy to forward this to our engineers for product improvement. Thank you!