Sync issues and best practices

Hi. We have a small user-base (<20 users) with several terabytes of data.

There have been some sync issues, some of which might be a user working “too quickly”.
I’m hoping to get advice on best practices and if possible, some specifics on the questions and example, below.

My questions are:

  1. Are there best practices that could help us avoid sync issues?

  2. We have some mysterious “case sensitivity clashes”. How are those resolved?

  3. In the example below, is this a symptom of making changes too quickly?
    (If so, how do we avoid it? Wait? Use the web interface?)

Thank you.

Expected behaviour

The client/server handles changes.

Actual behaviour

Clients saw lots of errors, including:
local file name clash
possible case sensitivity clash

Steps to reproduce

Here is an example:

A user renamed two directories:

/top/subdir/One -> /top/subdir/Alpha
/top/subdir/Two -> /top/subdir/Beta

The user then copied over two directories named One and Two to /top/subdir/.
This caused multiple errors/warnings for the user and other users.

Server configuration

Operating system: Debian 10.3

Web server: Apache

Database: MariaDB 10.3

PHP version: 7.3

ownCloud version: 10.5.0

Client configuration

Client version: 2.6.3

Operating system: Windows 10

Yes, when you do large changes, we can only recommend to make those in the Web UI.
Otherwise just wait till the sync run has passed and the icons are green.

Thanks. I have another question. A large directory was accidentally deleted. We restored it (though it took around 15 minutes for it to show up in deleted) but it’s showing in the web UI as “pending”, two hours later.

Using the web UI, if I click on individual sub-directories and list the files, then the sub-directory is no longer “pending”. But it’s unreasonable for me to click through the entire directory structure.

What’s going on? It doesn’t look like the sub-directories are changing from “pending” until I manually click through each one (and anything in any further sub-directories).

ownCloud relies heavily on case sensitive FSs. This means that a.txt and A.txt are 2 different files for ownCloud. This isn’t true in windows’ FS where both names refer to the same file.
I don’t think these clashes are resolved, so you should prevent them manually. If this happens, you might need to rename the problematic file from the web UI.

That usually means that the contents of the folder haven’t been scanned yet. Usually, this isn’t a problem and you should ignore it; just use ownCloud normally.
If you’re an admin with shell access in the ownCloud’s server, you can run the occ files:scan command to scan the FS (check the help for options)
Note that the occ files:scan command is expensive and it could take a long time.

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