Let me start by telling you how grateful I am about NextCloud. It is working really well so far and I feel like it’s much better documented and of course more transparent in every way compared to my old cloud solution Google Drive.
I would like to have further understanding for some sync scenarios so that I avoid possible mistakes. Let me briefly describe my setup:
-Nextcloud is running on a Ubuntu server
-I plan to have two Windows computers running the Nextcloud sync client.
What I’m curious and slightly worried about is this:
Let’s say Windows computer 1 has a sync folder that contains files A, B and C.
I sync that folder with the Nextcloud server.
Now I want to connect Windows computer 2 so that it also syncs. But it only has files A and B in it’s sync folder.
What will happen now with Nextcloud? Will nextcloud delete file C from the server and from computer 1 since it does not exist on computer 2?
Similarly, what if computer 2 also has file D in the sync folder, but this file does not exist on the server or on computer 1 yet? What will happen with file D?
If all clients are in sync with the server the described situations will not exist.
Please do a fresh sync (checkout) from the server on each machine and you are done.
For a better understanding I have a question:
What about file C? Why is it not present?
Did someone remove it here? If yes, then the sync process will remove it at the server as well and afterwards on each connected client.
To answer why I’m at this situation:
I was using Google Drive on both Windows computers. When they forced me to change the sync program (it’s no longer called “backup and sync”) and thus re-index everything (2TB takes weeks to sync with Google), I finally had enough with Google Drive and I started researching moving to NextCloud.
Unfortunately I still had to keep working on both computers without any sync running, so now the folders inside the Drive root are slightly different on both computers.
Now that I think of it, maybe the right way would be to merge those different root folders locally on computer 1 and then download everything from the server on computer 2.
Would it be possible to skip the part where I download everything from the server for computer 2? Can I skip the server download part if I just copy the exact same files manually from a hard disk to computer 2?
Why not using the Virtual Drive feature? Then you do not have to download everything? Beside of that if you are running your server locally it shouldn’t take weeks to sync 1.8TB of data, although even then I don’t think it makes sense to have everything locally on your computer, unless it is a mobile device and you have to be able to work offline with the files.
Thanks for pointing out the virtual drive feature, I wasn’t aware of it!
Do you think it would also work in video-editing scenarios? Like what would happen if I opened a project file in my video editor that is dependent on ten video files being locally on the hard disk? Would virtual drive be smart enough to immediately go and fetch the needed video files or would I have to go and download the actual copies manually?
It depends on how your video editor app is requesting files from the OS (Windows in your case).
You give it a try.
You can easily add a sync of a substructure of you NC server. No need to wait until all your data is synced.
I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work. When you open a file that is made available via VirtualDrive, it will get downloaded completely before the application with which you want to use it can open it. In the case of large files that have not yet been made available locally, it will of course take longer until they are opened for the first time, but after that there should no longer be any difference, because the files will then be available locally in the corresponding folder.
Addition: You can also make certain files or folders manually available for offline usage, which means that these files or folders then always get synched to your local machine.
I didn’t know about the virtual drive feature, thank you for pointing it out.
Would it work for video editing as well? How would my video editor handle opening a project that requires ten video files that are residing locally on my hard drive? Will virtual drive automatically fetch the videos I need, or will I need to manually download them?
Yes, the application send a request to the file system layer and windows is requesting Nextcloud to load it. The application will wait for the files like it would wait for it on poorly slow file systems. Anyone remember floppy disk drives
