Syncing Old HDD, bad idea?

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1

Context:

Let’s say I had an old hard drive that used to be synced to nextcloud, but I stopped using that computer a few months ago.

I put this harddrive into a new device, and want it to sync all the new changes. I try to do it, but the nextcloud client won’t let me choose it because it “already is a sync folder”

I delete the .sync files, and now nextcloud lets me sync it.

Question

  1. Does syncing an old hard drive where you have deleted the .sync files cause the nextcloud server to delete any files server-side that weren’t on that hdd?
  2. Are there any protections built in to avoid disaster with this kind of user-error?
  3. Is it better to just wipe the HDD and sync from scratch, even if the system will have to download many 100s of GBs?
  4. Any other things to learn from this?

Thanks,

-TmG

2

Well, there have been reports where bad things happened and data was removed or overwritten. I don’t know all the conditions of that, but with that in mind, I would be extremely careful.

I am not sure if the client considers timestamp on the system or on the server. You could try to test it with a small folder. You can put the same name as existing files in a test folder, then fake an old date on your local drive and try to sync it and check out what happens.

Personally, I have a fiber connection and I would just do that and let it run over the weekend.

You can try to get through the details, check how it behaves and report this back to the developers and which part to improve so for the future such operations become more reliable and more predictable.