Correct. It is running on Server 2008 R2. The sync completed successfully on Friday, so I came in this morning, and unchecked a folder that one of my AD users keeps his files in. This is shared from Server 2008 r2 server. After unchecking that folder and a few others, he told me that only 2 folders were visible. Upon checking I discovered that all but those 2 folders had been deleted from the serverâs actual shared folder!
I was able to download the files from the Nextcloud Box as a zip file (so then the files were NOT removed from the Nextcloud Box datastore) using the web interface and so was able to restore them, but now I cannot move forward deploying this.
Note that when I attempted this with my Mac OS X client, it did what you would expect, removing the files from the Nextcloud Box and NOT from my local desktop. Not sure why the difference. When unchecking a folder in the sync app, it DOES say itâs going to delete local files, but I figured that was just a problem with the way the warning was worded. Now I see that it means what it says!
I just tested this again with another folder I didnât care about. I watched as it ACTUALLY DELETED the files on my local system. Anyone in dev watching this?? How can I alert them of this situation? This makes this product a complete no go. No sync app should delete local files simply because I deselect the option to sync!!!
You can go to the github page, I believe this is the one you want:
Iâm a bit confused about your situation however, as I havenât had the Nextcloud desktop client delete files remotely. If I ever tell it to not sync a folder, it will delete the files on the local machine and they remain on the server.
Here is some more background on this topic from the client bugtracker:
Your Nextcloud box here is the Nextcloud server, and your Windows server acts as a client (for the Nextcloud service)? You said you could recover it from the Nextcloud box, so it was not deleted on the (Nextcloud) server, right? So itâs the same story like your other post Unchecked folders will be REMOVED from your file system
If you want your Win-Server being considered as a server, you should perhaps use the external storage function. This way you can include storage from your windows server into the Nextcloud box (all data will remain on the Win-Server without being on the Nextcloud server. If a client connects through Nextcloud, Nextcloud has to fetch the data from your Win server). This comes perhaps closer to a solution you were looking for.
Like @tflidd says Iâm assuming your network looks a little like this:
I donât necessarily understand why youâd run it like this when you could push the client to endpoints directly, but that isnât important here. What is important is the client works as intended, if you uncheck a folder on the client (which your Windows server is in this capacity) it will remove the files; you donât want them synced, why should you have them wasting space on your client?
If OneDrive or Dropbox forced me to sync everything and didnât allow me to uncheck what I didnât want on my local machine, itâd be a pretty awful service.
If you do want them on the client, why do you uncheck the box? Theyâll sync away forever between the NC box and the file server without question.
Entirely disagree. Thatâs the point of removing the sync relationship; you donât want to sync the files. If you wanted to do a one-time sync, do so to a staging folder and copy them over to their final destination. Guarantees remote Box files canât be modified that way too.
Files that can be reproduced easily that take up a lot of space like ISO files do not need to be synced. Old user profile backups I may want to keep for a bit until I am sure the user has what they need, archives of old files that accounting doesnât want to get rid of, but I know are of no use anymore, I can think of many reasons why I want the files accessible in my root share folder, but not taking up space on a cloud server.
I have reviewed several cloud systems. Absolutely none work the way NextCloud works. They canât. No one would use them. No one would take the risk. There is a scenario where someone could uncheck a folder, delete the local files, not know what to do, and so delete the account on the nextcloud server, thereby permanently losing their files.
I am never going to convince developers there why this is such a bad idea, so I simply will not use this product. Thank you for you support in all this. I just wish it were made really clear before purchasing the Nextcloud Box and the Rasberry Pi that this was the case, but it wasnât a very expensive experiment, and I was only testing to begin with.
There is one thing: The sync client can ignore certain file types. So it doesnât sync any of the ISO files but it doesnât work on a folder basis.
There are two principal ways to do sync:
One is, you just sync the whole folder, everything within is synced on the server. On clients you can exclude certain folders or sync only subfolders to save memory. But everything is on the server and in doubt the server is master. This is the way Nextcloud works
Other way is to have a folder and you cherry-pick the folders you want to have synced on the server. So you keep the file structure on your client and you only sync a few folders.
I had the same problem that I didnât want to sync everything to the server. So I decided I keep my file structure and I add a sync folder. Then I only put data into the sync folder of projects Iâm currently working on. Once they are finished, I move it back in my regular folder structure outside the sync client. It sounds a bit complicated but now itâs working quite good. On my mobile computer, I now have all files of current projects synced.
The first sync scheme is probably easier to implement in term of how to handle conflict files. So only need to do an initial sync and then you just keep track of the changes. In the second, there are some more questions: Do you keep the whole folder structure of the client, what if the folders are wide-spread over different disks. What if the folder structure between clients donât match? If you exclude a folder from syncing and keep data, what do you do when you chose to sync it again. Should the client update the serverâs folder or the other way round. What if files on both sides have changed?
Your wishes are not impossible but they require some work on how to implement this stuff. On a community project, you can help to find a suitable way (for some things you donât need to be a programmer). If you canât do it yourself, you can put a bounty on a specific issue: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/6189424-unchecking-synchronized-subfolder-without-local-delete
or get an enterprise subscription.
You donât have to get involved and you donât have to pay, you can just decide not to use it or a different solution. At some point there will be perhaps a solution and you might reconsider to use Nextcloud.
