Unckecked folders will be removed from you file system

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
1

I have already red about this topic, but here is my simple use case:

  • have some work already synced on server for folder X
  • add LOT of work to folder X while Nextcloud server is offline and client not started
  • restart Nextcloud client and Server
  • unckeck folder X for any reason
  • LOT of work suppressed as suggest the message “Unckecked folders will be removed from you file system”
    By chance it did not happened ! but how SCARY !
2

I found a post from @tflidd from 2017. But i don’t know if it still applies 100% to every situation.

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

And my additional solution: backup, backup, backup

3

Thank you for answering. In the use case I presented “everything is NOT on the server”, since the Nextcloud server and client where down while adding files to the folder X. Making a backup prior to unchecking a folder will not come to the user mind, unless being extremely fearful. The way
Nextcloud works supposes the added work is synchronized to the server prior to unchecking the folder. So there should be at least a huge warning: “is your work in this folder synchronized to the server? beware you may LOOSE all unsynchronized work”, followed by “please confirm you are sure you know what you are doing”.

4

See also Unsynced folders are lost, if you uncheck · Issue #1238 · nextcloud/desktop · GitHub

5

@szaimen
Thank you for the issue. Maybe the best of the 73 comments in the issue.
Comment with four likes :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

while some users post their stories how they lost their data and some others post their thoughts on how program should behave, it looks like that the problem is not that “developers” don’t care about some lost data, but that they just don’t know how to fix it in software core without breaking the whole thing that was forked from another project.

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Do someone know if it is true and the problem?