Is there a way to get the desktop client to only keep placeholders for files in a certain shared directory and only download specific files as requested? I have a large archive that I would like to share with my brother but he wouldn’t want to sync the entire archive only selected subdirectories or files at a given time. Essentially I am looking for the desktop to work more like the mobile apps.
Eric
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There are plans for it:
You can unselect certain folders from syncing.
This feature would be a real benefit to me too. Is there any time frame on the plans?
There is no official date visible, so you can’t expect it soon (this year). It’s for sure somewhere in the pipeline. To push this, you must either get involved or it requires more enterprise users to ask for this feature.
but you cannot just say dont download ANYTHING (if you have files on the root you cant unselect them), although that would really be helpful to just have ghosts and only download the files you really need.
Nothing? We are working with 10 people using NextCloud because someone decided to use this.
But we have been experiencing troubles of people moving or renaming some files accidentally, confusing their files with the ones on the NextCloud making this a mess.
We need our team members to be able to ONLY download the files, but we need them to keep updated each time new files are added so NextCloud can download the files as soon they are available.
Until “download on demand” functionality is added to NextCloud, I’d recommend that, for a large archive, you could rather connect to your NextCloud instance as a network drive.
There are instructions for doing this in the NextCloud user manual, and I’ve done it on both Ubuntu (through Nautlius) and on Windows 10 (through Explorer). So can confirm that it works just fine.
Instead of syncing your files locally, this allows you to access your NextCloud remotely from the file manager.
Then you could copy the files you wanted from the remote server to the local drive - just hold the “ctrl” key as you drag and drop to indicate that you want to make a copy - then move the files back to your NextCloud instance after you’re done.
But, yes, it would be nice to have an “on demand” mode too, so that this could be automated for you. But until that’s available, this manual approach would be the current workaround.
Have you tried sharing them the Data with read only permission? Personally i’ve not tried this so far, but it should prevent them from changing the files by accident i guess.
its been over a year since the OP. Id love to see this as onedrive and dropbox are already doing this and a main staple in the selling point for us is that i need access to 100% of my cloud storage for the non-technical employees at my company without needing to share sections at a time. Our devices have anywhere from 256g to 1tb of total storage and i need to be able to access various files among the multi TB server i have onsite. most of these workers are mobile and relying on FTP is not viable. VFS caching is the only thing holding us back from a 100% transition from sharepoint systems to simpler Nextcloud systems.
If you need to go to Berlin, the prerequisite is not ‘I need a car’ - you can also go by train. You should ask yourself why you ‘need’ to have 100% virtually available or if there’re other and perhaps even better ways to accomplish what you actually need. It could be that you mix up goals and instruments/tools/ways.
If you use the owncloud client, you can have this functionality now.
You may get errors about not supported server, but it still works.
Nextcloud is also planning to put this feature in the next major release: