Poorly thought-through process for "Do Not Sync"

SeaDrive
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1

Hi there,

I have SeaDrive running on my mac and my windows machine - that’s how I keep things in sync. I store all of my school stuff on it.

I was running out of space on the mac so I right clicked some of the older folders and selected “Do Not Sync” assuming that that’s how you remove local copies.

It deleted them from the online storage and it propagated to the other computer. Then it proceeded to make duplicate folders and rename my old ones (I’m assuming because the windows computer had some stuff in it too?). Very messy, now I have to figure out what’s what and place in the right folders again.

I don’t know why you would actually delete the files online when I say don’t sync from 1 station. That doesn’t make sense, I think it’s messed up to think about it that way. Leave the online files alone, and if I choose to sync the folder again, ask me about sync collisions if files are different. Very odd.

Weird, confusing, and unexpected behavior. Very odd thing to do. I can’t think of any other online file storage service that follows this behavior. Dropbox, OneDrive, NextCloud, all of them have sane defaults and don’t err on the side of deleting files!

2

Hi @tryproseafile ,

the correct way to remove the local cache is through the option remove download. We will check the not sync option for the problem.

3

Welp, how do I get my files back? SeaDrive erased them from the local drive too, even though I selected “NO” to the prompt to delete however many things. It also propagated the deletion to my other station (that’s a dumb choice right there).

I can see snapshots but they’re scattered files, not exactly a full snapshot, I’m assuming just what was “changed” or deleted in that one command the server received.

I looked at the directory on the server and everything is in blocks so not sure what to do with that.

Any ideas?

4

Hi @tryproseafile, you can log in to seafile in your browser, and then find the snapshot before deletion through the library history, and restore the deleted files in the snapshot.

5

You know, you might as well tell me to turn it off and turn it back on at this point. :man_facepalming:
I already told you I can see snapshots. I can see you’re not interested in reading my replies but I wonder what makes you reply still. Beats me.

Anyway, I get it, free software, on my own. But I lost trust in Seafile, I should have have never used it. So much headache, such poorly thought software in many different areas.

In the end i had to fight macOS to backup all the version of the files that still exit on the drive, and let me tell you it’s a PAIN in the ass. What a stupid process to go through. I want to gouge my eyes out already.

So once I had that I restored the library to a snapshot BEFORE the first deletion because after that point your snapshots are trash - they don’t contain all the files, but they do contain random stuff, duplicated folders, missing folders, missing files, and so on. Mind you, I always selected NO on the deletion prompt from seadrive in the first place, but clearly what the software does is not under the user’s control.

Once I’ve restore the library, I now have older versions of files in directories I had before, no v2. Many files have since changed and so did the directory structure. 54GB of crap to go through and compare manually because again, the directory structure doesn’t match anymore.

Oh, yeah, here’s some piece of advice for your devs:

WARN A USER THAT DO NOT SYNC MEANS DELETE FROM LIBRARY and that it WILL PROPAGATE TO ALL CLIENTS and that if any users select NO on the mass delete prompt that randomly pops up, Seafile will DUPLICATE their data and create “My Organized Stuff 2” containing blank files, and incomplete sub-directories…

Ok, off to do manual labor for hours like a fool because I’ve made poor choices and used Seafile to sync between 2 computers and an iPad. That’s all I wanted!

6

The “Do Not Sync” action is actually not useful for Seafile. We should have hidden it but didn’t notice that before. We’ll hide it in the next version.

7

You mentioned many times the “prompts” or pop up. Which prompts do you refer to? Clicking “Do Not Sync” doesn’t create any prompts.

8

A prompt with 3 buttons: Settings, Yes, and No, asking if I want to delete a large number of files (some of the stuff I sync are self-contained archaic websites used by old learning management systems, so tiny js, css, and html files.

I clicked NO on that both on the laptop and the windows computer but that didn’t stop the multi-request deletes. When I look at the history I see 10-20 delete entries with a variable number of “and ## other files”.

9

Could you send your client log files to support at seafile.com?