Updating a file’s timestamp doesn’t get synced to Google Drive leading to inconsistency between local and cloud states.
Steps to reproduce (Linux command line):
echo “Hello” > hello.txt # Creates a new file with the mtime T, uploads it to Google Drive with “modification time” set to T
sleep 300 # Wait 5 minutes
echo “Hello” > hello.txt # Or ‘touch hello.txt’ = update the file without changing its contents.
Wait a few moments for the change to get synced and check the file’s “modification time” on drive.google.com . The file’s “modification time” on Google Drive is still set to T instead of T+5 minutes.
The issue is a year old now, but I have been trying this, too and the results are mixed and confusing (Insync 3.5.3.50123,Ubuntu):
When using touch to change the mtime locally (touch *), the times show the new timestamp as expected on my laptop. Sometimes, the new timestamp gets synced to gdrive, but only for a minority of files. After a while, most of the original mtimes are synced back from gdrive to my local file system. In the end, I have some inconsistent mtimes and some that are consistent but do not reflect the datetimes I set locally.
Any hints? Anything I can configure?
This is annoying, because modification times are a highly useful tool and not being able to rely on them is frustrating.
Let me follow up this issue to our engineers. We were able to replicate this not just on Linux, but also on Windows-- so it doesn’t seem to be OS-specific anymore.