Owncloud Windows client deletes local files out of sync

Hello everybody,

in my company we are heavily using Owncloud between departments, in order to have, for each role in different department, a custom visibility of only few files or folder which come from a single source tree.

The filesystem is physically on a NAS, and it is mounted from the Owncloud server with SMB, directly from the interface.

To be clear, we are using a file structure as:

/root_folder
__/Folder_A
____/Folder_A_a
____/Folder_A_b
__/Folder_B
____/Folder_B_a

etcetera, where:

/root_folder – only admin has access
__/Folder_A. – only admin has access
____/Folder_A_a – admin and users X, Y
____/Folder_A_b – admin and users Y, K
__/Folder_B – only admin has access
____/Folder_B_a – admin and users Y, K

This configuration works great in the web access, while the clients, in Windows only and for users X, Y and K (so not for the admin) sometimes delete locally the files and somehow block the synchronisation.

My users are not able to replicate systematically the issue, they claim the fact that every 2-3 days some folders become unavailable on their Pc, while they are still able to access from the main web interface.

It seems an issue which affects the Windows client only, Mac users does not have these issues.

Sometimes the issue disappears rebooting the Windows Pc, sometimes not. The “force synchronisation” form the client does nothing: all markers remain green, so it “seems” there are not errors, as in the server log which seems to be completely clean.

Any suggestions?

I’m thinking to remove the SMB mount from OwnCloud GUI and use the operating system mounting (we are using the Unebootin distribution), does anybody knows if this may solve this case?

Thank you in advance for helping!

Expected behaviour

Folders disappear in the local synced folder

Actual behaviour

The folders are still available on the web interface

Steps to reproduce

Unable to reproduce

Server configuration

Operating system: Unebootint (Ubuntu)

Web server: Apache

Database: MySql

PHP version: 7

ownCloud version: latest

Storage backend (external storage): NAS with Samba from Owncloud GUI

Client configuration

Client version: Windows, latest

Operating system: Windows

OS language: Italian

@Gian_Giacomo Clients aren’t always aware of changes on mounted/external storages. Does the client update the files/folders after opening them in the web UI?

This was discussed in Mac client not synching all folders reliably

2 Likes

@michaelstingl hi, thank you for your reply, what do you mean with “Does the client update the files/folders after opening them in the web UI?” actually not, I mean, I told to my users to use the web access instead of the local synced folder only when they faces issues with the local files (so when locally some files disappear and they are still on line)

As I understood from the link you provided me, the server may scan the mounted folders periodically in order to rebuild the indexes, right?

I’m currently trying to run the cron right now, it is taking a lot of time due the amount of datas there (almost 50Gb). Any suggestion about the frequency of the execution of this task?

Thanks in advance