Unselecting a file in "selective sync" will delete it locally

I have a file that I do not want to sync to other devices.
The doco appears to suggest that unselecting that file in the “selective sync” section of the insync-app would do that.
Unfortunately, it does not.
Rather it leaves the file on the other devices and deletes is locally.
This suggests that the Google Drive is treated as the master and local devices can only keep subsets of the master set.
If this is true than that should be explicitly said to be the case.

However, I argue that this is not true, because insync behaves exactly as expected in the case of the “ignore list” where the direction of syncing can be specified explicitly.

I don’t know where the problem lies, but in my opinion it is wrong the way it is now.

@Humphrey_van_Polanen,

My apologies for the issue you are having. :frowning:

Please send us your logs.db and out.txt file to support@insynchq.com.

Please include the link of this post.

Thank you.

Yes this is the way selective sync works since the beginning. Since that day, loads of people are asking to get it working the other way around, or at least add a option to let you choose which way that has to be done.
IMO, keeping files locally and not on GDrive is the way to do this feature, but with the rise of small computing (chromebook etc), Insync decided to keep files on GDrive and delete the files locally to free up local storage space. I leave it to your judgment if this might be useful for some people, but not for me.

Till last week, deleted files where saved at least in a hidden insync trach folder so you where still able to recover them easily, but since then, now files are deleted straight on, even more scary for me…

I’m left with the ignore list as the only way to be able to exclude from the sync without having local files deleted. But this work on the whole GDrive and can’t be limited to a specific folder, who is a real pain.

Stan

@roald,

Judging by the comment from @sbrusse, it appears I have collided not with a bug but with a design-issue. To me that means the bug is in the design or, rather, in the thinking that led to the design. Accordingly, I don’t think that sending log files will help.

Meanwhile, insync should improve its documentation to clearly state how it all works, but really it would be a good idea to revisit the design and allow the customer to decide what will and what won’t be synced. After all, the decision of how to organize data is the business of the user and that insync should respect that.

Humphrey

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is anybody monitoring this thread?

please make this feature happen. the way it works now - “reverse sync” doesn’t make sense to me.

I have a google drive folder with Gig’s and Gig’s of information.
when I have a new project and I download it to my computer I want to control my syncing
so it doesn’t start automatically. better yet, be able to set upload priority because uploading 30 Gig’s is intensive
and I have other smaller tasks that are maybe more important than this specific high size sync.

also there should be a way to cancel the sync. (not pause). say I see it started a 2 Gig sync
I should be able to stop it.

thank you

As of now, this is still a feature request. The current behavior has not been changed.

We will be including this in 2.0, as a workaround, the selective sync tab can be used for this.

Thank you.

Thank you Janine and the support team.
after an exchange of emails with Janine and the support team, I finally understood how to do this.

so the situation is that you want certain folders you are about to move to hard disk’s Google Drive
to NOT UPLOAD to Google Drive cloud through Insync.

say for instance it’s a 30GB folder and you don’t really need it uploading for a few days,
but you do want to keep the file structure you have in your google drive hard disk in your computer,
and you just want to omit certain folders from uploading.

you can use an ignore list:

if you want Insync to Ignore a a folder - you have to:

  1. go to “ignore list” and make a title of the folder you want to ignore and create a rule
  2. make sure the folder you want to ignore is outside the Google Drive folder
    (creating a “new folder” in google drive and changing it’s name to the rule wont cut it, unless you add “new folder” to the ignore list :smile: )
  3. move the folder to the google drive folder

what I did was add this to the ignore list:
new folder
*-ns

(*) - matches zero or more characters before the letters
“-ns” - a short for “not sync” for me
this way files or folders with these final letters “-ns” (from now on) won’t sync.

now I move a folder from an external drive (after adding -ns to it’s name…)
or I can create a folder on my hard disk’s google drive folder and just add the last letters “-ns”
and both won’t sync up to my google drive web folder.

and as for prioritizing uploads - it’s said that it will be a feature on version 2.0.

hope that helps.

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Many years later it seems like this was never addressed properly. For instance, in the process of "sync"ing my files (in this case I was uploading an important 50gb file) I unselected it from the selective “sync” list so that it would stop “syncing” to the cloud. What it did instead was to delete my file and stop uploading it. Now I have to figure out how to recover that sensitive file.

Clearly, this is still a design issue because it’s a design that is still causing issues. Here are my recommendations/requests: In the case that a file hasn’t been uploaded yet, do not allow it to be unchecked until it has been completely uploaded to the cloud - otherwise when it is deleted locally and the user finds out that is not what they wanted, they won’t also find out that their file has been deleted and isn’t in the cloud either.

Note, I am familiar with and use the ignore list. I didn’t even consider that the appropriate approach at the time because this was obviously a one-off and temporary scenario and the ignore list is really meant for pattern matching at large. I don’t think referencing that as the correct and intended solution is a legitimate alternative but more of a hacky workaround to an existing bug.