Warnings about not syncing symlinks

Bugs and issues Linux
#7

No, I didn’t bother with the logs since its now seems clear what is going on based on the discussions. I was poking around on the web site and even found in the release notes that a new prompt was added in cases were the user tries to use symlinks. So I think the redux here is just that insync doesn’t sync traditional symlinks (maybe this is a limitation with google drive or onedrive actually?) and now has just added a notice to let the user know that they are not being synced.

If you want my suggestion about a change moving forward it would be this. If insyc really doesn’t sync symlinks, then I think a prompt that is turned on by default is a good idea. But then it would be great to have a settings option checkbox to turn off the notices about just the symlink issue (but does NOT also turn off other important notices like local/cloud conflicts, etc). I think most users probably would like to know that symlinks won’t work, but then don’t want to be reminded of it after the first time they see it. Currently every time insyinc is restarted, you see all these notices again, and that gives the impression that something is perpetually broken. Adding a checkbox in the settings would be a nice way to make it the users choice to not be reminded, and having the messages turned on by default insures that the user sees the message at least once.

Local sync is a nice feature, but I don’t use it like a symlink. It is actually more of a could sync extension feature and I think it is a nice one btw.

3 Likes
#8

This message is a big problem for me. I use insync on multiple Linux machines to keep my home directory on each of them synched to the same google drive folder. The directory contains lots of symlinks (about 1600 of them). Up until recently insync ignored the symlinks quietly. Now whenever I start insync it flags each symlink as “Attention required” with a message like

/home/arnold/Insync/gdrive/home/www/Moebius was not uploaded because syncing symlinks is not supported. Please use Local Selective Sync from the Cloud Browser and choose the target folder to be synced.

I get 1600 such message every time I start insync. If I have “Show pop-up notifications” checked in the preferences, I also get 1600 pop-up notifications!

Please fix this!

Concerning support for symlinks, I don’t know what Mia means when she says symlink support on Insync 3 works via Local Selective Sync. The symlink support I would like is when two computers sync the same google drive folder, if I create a symlink on one of the computers, the same symlink will appear on the other computer, just like if I create a file on one of the computers the same file will appear on the other. Is this possible?

2 Likes
#9

@bnpndxtr01 You have a strong point with that suggestion; improving the prompt is indeed in our to-do list. :slight_smile:

@dnarnold, my apologies for the wrong choice of words-- I should have said that symlink support is not supported on Insync 3, and a workaround is to instead sync the target folder via Local Selective Sync. Thank you for pointing that out.

#10

I have the same problem. Is there any fix perspective?

#11

Linux is symlink based… There is a lot of them on my acccount

1 Like
#12

We are working on this with our engineers to address the prompt. Were you trying to sync any symlinks at the time it popped up? If so, could you try to sync the target folder via Local Selective Sync instead?

#13

Yes, all those warnings aren’t good at all… Perhaps I miss a really important warning among them.

For me it would be important to sync the symlink itself, and not the target file or directory.
Syncing the target folder is already addressed by the ‘local selective sync’.

Suppose a create a symlink and Insync creates a copy (not a link) of the target. In another computer I’ll have two copies of this file! If I edit one of them I’ll have a huge consistency problem! And how the original box will handle the mapping of two distinct files back to a file and a symlink?

I don’t really care how Google Drive will interpret the symlink in the web interface. I just like to have my Linux boxes synced accordingly.

3 Likes
#14

Hi everyone!

I had the same problem with the update, will Insync don’t support these symlinks anymore or it will be solved in a future update?

#15

Hi. I’m suffering the same issue since one of the updates. Any chance this will be fixed somehow? It’s really annoying to have those errors every time the application starts.

1 Like
#16

Hi! You can disable these prompts by going to the three-dot menu on the upper right > Preferences > uncheck the third box :slight_smile:

#17

This is not a solution. Disabeling all messages is not the same as disabeling only the symlinks messages

#19

I totally agree with you jander. It would be great if we could just sync the symlink itself, without the folder to that link, since the folder can be synced otherwises.

Symlink files being different on windows and linux is not a big deal, if both types are synchronised, resulting in two link-files being shown in the folder, one for Windows and one for Linux, one working in one system and the other one in the other. The user can deal with this in his own way.

#21

I’m not sure how long this setting has existed, but you are correct, there is a setting I can disable called “Show warning prompts about unsynced symlinks”. This seems to be the solution everyone on this thread wants with regard to notifications.

Regarding actually syncing symlinks, I agree it’d be useful and interesting. I’m not sure how it would work… Insync detects a local symlink and then creates a “fake” text file in Google drive with some special format that Insync would detect so it could create a local symlink on another computer in the same way as the first computer. Maybe it’s a JSON file at the root of the tree or possibly individual text files with a name like “symlink:link_name” and the content would be the file path that you’d get with the Linux readlink utility (print resolved symbolic links or canonical file names).

#22

@dnarnold I’m trying to do something similar (but mainly for backup and restore purposes, not for a concurrent home drive across multiple machines). How is your Insync set up? Is your base folder the same as your home directory or do you just use the default location and then selective local sync your home/user folder? Upon initial setup, I selected the /home folder as my base folder and now it’s syncing everything, which I guess is what I wanted. But not sure what will happen to my home directory if I change my InSync base folder.

#23

Here is my approach. I have several computers (home desktop, office desktop, various laptops), all running a recent version of Ubuntu Linux. The home directories of each of these contain several directories (bin, Desktop, lib, …) which are specific to the local machine and are not synced to google drive. But the rest of the home directory is synced between all machines as follows. Each home directory contains a directory Insync/gdrive. This is my Insync folder on each of the machines, so when anything in this directory is changed on any of my machines, the change is propagated by Insync to google drive and from there back to all the other machines. (On all machines I have “Sync new children of partially-synced folders automatically” set and “Sync new top-level cloud items automatically” unset).

Inside Insync/gdrive I have a directory called home and inside that a bunch of subdirectories (programs, images, …) which is where the main contents of my home directory reside. To make it easier to access these I have symlinks

~/programs -> Insync/gdrive/home/programs
~/images -> Insync/gdrive/home/images

etc.

This works nearly perfectly for my needs. The one thing that does not work is symlinks inside the directory Insync/gdrive/home. If I create or delete a symlink on one machine, I have to manually create it on all the other machines.

#24

In the past I have used Insync to backup symlinked files and folders for years with no issues, and when I had signed up for the service, this was a major marketing and selling point.

Why was this feature dropped? It really was very useful.

#25

Hi @Niko_Z,

In 1.x, symlink support worked such that Insync syncs the target of the symlink — on the cloud, it’s as if the target folder is directly in the location of the symlink. This behavior is similarly achieved by using the Local Selective Sync function on Insync 3 (found on the upper right of the app UI). Could you let me know if the Local Selective Sync addresses this workflow?

#26

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. It is not quite the same, the advantage of the symlink sync is greater flexibility regarding folder and file placement. Local Selective Sync cannot quote replicate this behavior, as it syncs folders and files according to their original location.

It is usable, but it does not replicate the full functionality, especially for users that work across multiple workstations, and across different operating systems.

May I know whether the feature was abandoned due to technical reasons, or was it a design decision?

#27

Hi. While I’m suffering this problem, the reason is due to Emacs temporary files - when a file is being modified it creates a temporary of the format

lrwxrwxrwx.  1 rnc rnc       31 Jan 19 16:03 .#test.txt -> rnc@atlantis.1857977:1610961983

What would be useful is an option to either ignore symlinks or to ignore temporary files of certain formats?

#28

Hi @rnc,

If the file starts with a # then you can enter this on the ignore list: \#* (backslash before the # and an asterisk after). Let me know if that doesn’t work.