I reached out to customer service via email, but have not received a response. As this issue could be very costly for some, I wanted to post a warning here. Below is my email to Insync with a few edits to remove personal information:
I have ~ 100 GB of Google Drive files. I recently purchased a new desktop and wanted to sync all of my Google Drive files to my computer. I read about the new changes to Insync and was interested in being able to specify multiple folder locations.
My goal was:
-
Have some top-level folders (Documents, Music, etc) synced to my fast SSD
-
Have other top-level folders (Videos, Backup, Archive, etc) synced to my slower HDD
-
Have every single file in Google Drive synced to my computer using one of the above
I set up the sync (see below), and started it. When I got up in the morning to check, all of the default location folders had synced successfully, but all of the custom location folders had not. None of the folders on my local machine had any files in them and Insync had deleted those folders and files from Google Drive! The files had never been downloaded, there was no .insync trash folder. In total, InSync deleted thousands and thousands of files.
This is the second time that the Insync software has deleted massive numbers of files from my cloud storage. Surely there must be a way to check if a sync configuration is going to perform large numbers of deletes and ask or warn the user? Or a way to validate what changes will be made when doing initial sync?
I followed Insync’s suggestions and blog post, and I think what I did is a pretty common use-case. What went wrong? What can I do in the future (if I continue to use InSync) to have some of my Google Drive folders go to one location, and some to another?
It looks like I may be able to recover the files through Google Drive, but I’m going to have to restore everything from Trash, which means spending hours figuring out which files really should be deleted, and which should not.
Setup:
-
Downloaded InSync on 12/15/2018 (latest version, not going to start InSync to check version #)
-
Signed in and read through the initial instructions, as well as the blog post (https://help.insynchq.com/key-features-and-syncing-explained/syncing-superpowers/sync-or-merge-a-top-level-folder-to-another-location-in-your-computer)
-
I paused synching
-
Changed my sync location to D:\gdrive
-
From the file explorer, I used the non-selective Sync view (the bullet list 3 item icon to the top right was off/not-highlighted)
-
For each folder in Google drive, I hovered over the folder and either selected the option to 'Sync to default location", or ‘Sync to custom location’.
-
For all custom locations, I selected a root folder of E:\gdrive, and choose ‘Sync as a subfolder’
-
This resulted in Insync creating sub-folders with names corresponding to the top level Google Drive folders (see screenshot #1).
-
I then confirmed that every top-level Google Drive folder in the Insync file explorer had the Sync icon next to it, and the correct location (default or custom).
I then hit the play button on the bottom to resume syncing and watched the feed and messages for a few minutes. Everything seemed to be working, and I went to bed.
Screenshots:
Directory for the custom location folders - the folders were created but all are empty. InSync deleted each of these folders in Google Drive
screenshot 1