Auto-upload. What's going on there?

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 🤖 Android
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Because I didn’t understand what was happening during auto upload, I reflashed my POCO F2 with a clean LineageOS 18.1 / Android 11 and GApps first. Then Installed “Total Commander” to have a simple view into the file system.
Then I took 2 pictures with the buildin camera app. One of these pictures I moved from “DCIM/Camera” to “Download”.

On the server side (Manjaro-Linux machine in my LAN) I created a new folder “Upload-Test” in Nextcloud and copied a 2 pictures from anywhere to the folder.

After preparing this, I have installed NextCloud Client 3.18.0 from froid-store, and conneted the client to my server. All fine so far.
All folders are visible. I can download a picture from server to the phone. And I’m able to delete it.
Ok. Only 1 file remains at server side “Upload-Test” after this initial test.

To start “auto-upload” test on the phone I just took a new photo. The Client App opens and asks for configuration. I choosed “upload existing files”, “keep original” and set “remote folder” to my “Upload-Test” folder.
After activating all my files are synced to server as expected. Wow, fine.

Then I copied the saved file from Download to DCIM/Camera. But nothing happend. Hm.
I renamed the file. Nothing.
I copied the file. Nothing.
I changed timestamp with total commander. Nothing.

Then I took a new photo and the new file is transferred instantly to the server.
Finaly I edited the non uploaded file within gallery. The canged file is transferred too.

Next day I took again a copy of the “not transferred” picture, within the DCIM/Camera folder.
Ups. This time the file is transferred. The server says. Changed 15 hours ago …

There are many kinds of creating a new file. I have seen this common used variants in windows…

  • open file, write data, close file
  • open file & close file (creating a 0 byte file), reopen file, write data, close file
  • creating a new file anywhere and rename&move the final file to destination

So I guess, there is a problem in handling with “FileObserver” in combination with cache.
Maybe that Nextcloud client did not handle all file creation/change methods …

Henning

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@Andy this seems to be a quite detailled posting (except for NC version and such) but maybe you could chime in here and see if you could use this info somehow?

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Sorry,
I’m not familiar with NC error handling yet …
What do you need? Feel free to ask (and point me where to find)

Server-System: Linux 5.10.89-1-MANJARO x86_64
Prozessor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) J4105 CPU @ 1.50GHz (4 cores)
RAM:15.29 GB
NC 23.0.0
PHP 8.0.14
PostgreSQL 13.4

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My guess is it is a “designed behavior”. The upload relies on Android’s media indexing and also “remembers the last time it detected uploads” so if files with older creation/modification dates than the last detection get added they will be ignored/undetected.

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@Andy
Maybe. But who knows?

And if your guess is right, why there is no hint about this “feature”?
The name “auto-upload” is somewhat misleading in this case, since it suggests just “auto upload” and not “auto-upload if the file is newer as”.
Seems that there are many people with upload problems …

And of course, if you are right, I would like to have some more features in client software:

  • show last upload timestamp (not sync timestamp since there is no real sync)
  • button to force a full upload (maybe reset timestamp)
  • checkbox if you would like full upload every time or upload only newly created files
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It is an open source project, so as always pull requests / contributions are welcome! :heart:

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