Do not upload/download files when they already exist on the target computer in another directory

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
1

Hi!

I have been a nextcloud user for 6 months now and kudos to everyone who has been developing nextcloud.

I have an ide which would eliminate at least a bit of waste (in the lean sense). Let me give my usecase.

I am on a trip equipped with smartphone, laptop and photocamera. I want to share selected pictures and videos with family and friends. For that I have created directory “My trip” on the nextcloud server and that has been shared.
For the case smartphone gets stolen, every picture and video shot with smartphone gets uploaded to nextcloud immediately. (“Instant upload”)
Laptop is synced to the nextcloud (including “My Trip” and “Instant Upload”).
Data from photocamera gets uploaded to the laptop (“Stuff from camera”)

As you can see I have two source folders:“Instant Upload” and “Stuff from camera” and one target directory:“My trip”.

Now I want to filter the stuff I put in the directory “My trip” for other to see. For that I use my laptop because larger screen.

Here comes the issue:
I have every picture and video on the server and on my laptop. When I copy a file from the source folder to the target folder (let’s say from “Stuff from camera” to “My trip”) on the laptop, sync client uploads the file to the server although the server already has that file, but in a different directory.
It would be awesome if server recognized that and it would make the copy directly on the server without uploading the file again from the laptop. Data plans get very expensive when travelling aboard!

Keep up the awesome work!

2

It should recognize when you move a file. For me it generally works, however sometimes it didn’t but I wasn’t able to reproduce this in order to report it to the bugtracker:

3

Yes, it does, but only of you move files, not if you’re copying them. If you’re copying a file to another directory within your sync-realm, the client will upload the copied file again to the server, when the server could just copy the file on it’s own… Instead it could just notify the server, to copy the file in the user directory on it’s behalf.

The next logical step would be for the client to receive a notification, that if should copy the file - if it already has it to it’s destination locally…

There are surely workflows, where such an option would save a lot of uploading.