Hello!
As a long time on-again/off-again user of owncloud, I’m excited to get stuck in to nextcloud and explore the new features & functionality - so far I’ve dabbled with the new public upload-only option and it’s silky smooth. Nice.
One of my biggest complaints about the owncloud android client was the duplication of data. It drove me mad constantly having to manage storage when - as you can imagine - 100 5MB photos auto-uploaded would consume 1000MB on storage, and I take a lot of photos.
owncloud kinda, sorta tried to resolve it by implementing move vs copy, but that introduces headaches. I want to keep my files where they are, certainly those in DCIM as fragmenting them around the filesystem and into obscure directories for apps is less than ideal.
So what’s the blocker in implementing functionality similar to other apps that allow upload (dropbox, onedrive, google photos, etc) without duplicating data? What is it they’re able to do that owncloud cannot, and is that something nextcloud devs can resolve? (ping @Andy here as I saw you in another thread).
I was wondering (and I’m by no means an expert, so feel free to disregard): can softlinks not be used in case of the file existing, prompting the download only if the softlink no longer works when the file is opened in the nc client (ie original file removed)? If not can nextcloud not duplicate it, upload the file, delete the duplicated file and utilise only a placeholder - similar to the new functionality on onedrive for windows - until that file is opened on the device, save keeping everything permanently on storage? I appreciate there’s a question about offline functionality with that, but perhaps it could be a settings option.
I’ve no doubt everything will improve gradually, but as this is still a stopper for me utilising the android client at the moment I’m hoping it gets some tlc soon!
