Sync to multiple places issue

Server
1

Probably a very unique situation here.

3 clients, 1 OwnCloud server.

I also have a Google Drive account.

On one client, I set it up to sync with my Owncloud and selected the Google Drive folder. This is with the intention of having a copy of the data on both the OwnCloud server and Google Drive.

Ran into an issue with that. For some reason one Sync program or the other decided that each time one sync’d, it would update and create another copy of the file. For example, if I put a MYFILE.JPG on OwnCloud, it would copy out to Google Drive as expected, but after a short time, a copy of the file MYFILE-1.JPG would show up on both drives as well. Then MYFILE-2.JPG and it would continue until it filled up the Google Drive (only 100GB), My guess is that one or both of the sync programs were changing the file enough to where the other sync program would want to re-sync it, but create a copy.

So, I figured that was not the way to do that, so I decided to keep them separated. Moved all of the files to an “OwnCloud” folder and re-directed OwnCloud client to sync that folder instead. I then quit out of Google Drive completely. Everything was fine for about 3 days, then all of a sudden, most of the files that were on OwnCloud disappeared. I had about 33 GB of files, it is now down to 1.1 GB. I’m kind of stumped at what happened. 1 of the 3 clients, fortunately, had broken the sync-link and still had all the file. I’ve not corrected that sync yet, but did make sure I had a copy of all the files.

Google drive issue is another story. Needless to say, 33 GB turned into 99 GB (out of 100 GB space) and I decided to just remove everything from it and re-copy what I want back on there. Deleting that much proved to be quite the challenge. But I’ll work that out later.

2

Personally I wouldn’t expect a trouble free operation for syncing over owncloud to an external drive. Is such an situation in the specs? I don’t know. I’m not using sync client at all.

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Syncing the /ownCloud folder with another cloud service is indeed not supported. Both services manipulate the folder in some ways to do their thing and that will always collide somehow. In case of Google Drive it makes most sense to just include it as external storage into ownCloud.
The disappearence of files doens’t seem to be reproducable. Of course any way to make it reproducable would be appreciated and we would look after it in the client repo: https://github.com/owncloud/client

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4

Just an update on this. After shutting off all the clients, the web interface came back and said there was an update. So I let it try to do the update and it hung up in Maintenance mode for 2 days.

Last night I decided to just remove it completely, reset the database, and reinstall the new version

If I was to guess at what happened to cause that, I would think it had something to do with the fact that I did a manual install instead of using the debian package. Maybe the update tried to use the debian package?

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