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Questions about Sync w/Google Drive - Shortcuts/Links/Files-Folders Added to Multiple Locations?
Google Drive has a nice feature to allow you to link / short-cut / add-to a file or folder in multiple folders at the same time (Shift z when a file/folder is selected brings up the "Add to" dialog, holding down ctrl while dragging a file/folder adds a small plus sign so when dropped it adds the file/folder to the destination rather an moving it)
My question is how does Readynas "Sync with Google Drive" on the clouds tab handle these linked files/folders?
This is important as my drive has ~100Gb of used space and >2TB if all the linked files/folders are downloaded into each folder. (This latter behaviour is how Google's own "Backup & Sync" software works on PCs and Macs.)
Will syncing my Google My Drive with Readynas use
- 100Gb of space or 2TB?
- use 100Gb or 2Tb of download bandwidth on 1st sync?
Many thanks
6 Replies
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Well I'll start to answer my own question... its 2Tb... looks like the ReadyNAS Sync w/Google Drive makes a *copy* of each folder that on gDrive is simply a sym-link/add-to ... taking how ever many times the space as their are sym-linked folders links on the ReadyNAS necessary.
Next step is for me to try and save 1.5Tb of space by manually putting in some symlinks and see if ReadyNAS Sync with w/Google Drive will respect these.
(Its worth noting that Google's own Backup & Sync software for desktops doesn't implement symlinks locally (despite Macs, Windows and Unix file systems having this functionality). Worse on Windows Backup & Sync won't follow symlinks - it just ignores them actually. This significantly adds to download time/bandwidth and of course diskspace. Sigh. )
So my work around to free up all the disk space of all the Google MyDrive symlinked / short cutted / added-to files, without causing Sync with Google Drive to think the files had been deleted, was to install and run rdfind via SSH (aka "Remove Duplicates Find")
You can find the Debian version of rdfind here, with instructions for installing using apt-get (authors website). (ReadyNAS OS is built on Debian version of Linux- took me a while to figure this out so I knew which version of rdfind to install.. so including this info here!)
(A long list of possible alternatives, including rdfind is here)
With rdfind I ran this command first to find out what rdfind woud delete and replace with links:
rdfind -makehardlinks true -dryrun true "/data/<path to GoogleDrive folder>"
rdfind puts a list of what it would do / does in a file "results.txt" (by default... you can change it)
Once you're comfortable run rdfind without the -dryrun option.
For my 2TB of files with over 3/4 being duplicates (long story)... rdfind took 3-4 hours to run on my ReadyNas RN314.
Hope this helps someone...
And I put in a functionality request for Sync with Google Drive here. Please vote for it! :-)
StephenB Sandshark - since you were both kind enough to reply to my other backup question... is the next one related to Sync with GoogleDrive.
So I installed and ran rdfind to replace all the duplicate files created by Sync with GoogleDrive...
And now I discover that Backup doesn't appear to "see" the symlinks... rather it appears to be "following" the symlinks and putting back the full content of the duplicated files! :-(
Of course this is exactly what I didn't want - as now my backup disk is way too small :-(
Is there an option on Backup to "copy symlinks, don't follow symlinks" or is this something I can tell rsync to if I use this to do a local backup? (To an option I think you both provided in the other thread?)
Thanks for your continued support...appreciated
ReadyNASNVUser wrote:
Is there an option on Backup to "copy symlinks, don't follow symlinks" or is this something I can tell rsync to if I use this to do a local backup? (To an option I think you both provided in the other thread?)
It would be nice to have an option for this on the advanced settings for rsync backup jobs - but that isn't there.
The NAS behavior here isn't something I've tested, and it might depend on the backup protocol you pick. Rsync certainly does have options on how to deal with symlinks, but I don't know how the NAS has set those options. Samba is configured to follow symlinks, so if you are using SMB with a remote source, then you certainly end up with the redundant copies.
Anyway, it would be easy to see what the NAS does here by creating a small test share, and trying an rsync backup job.
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