Just making a new post to raise awareness of this, since the team didn’t bother to notify users of a glaringly obvious absent feature in the new version of the app that may well affect your usage and backup of items you reasonably expected to be backed up. It took me some time of puzzling over why things didn’t sync properly and digging through posts here to find out that it’s not a bug, and it’s not just me. I saw a few posts that laid this out but I just couldn’t get my head around the fact that this could actually be the intended behavior of the app. Apparently, it is. I would have appreciated a heads up. Posting here to hopefully help save some others the time and frustration it took me to figure out that this function really does suck this badly. Good luck.
In particular, see this comment for how to check whether your local data and cloud data are still in sync (shamelessly linking to my own post, but I think it might be useful for many people).
It seems to me that the obvious fix to this would be to reinstate the periodic scanning we had in V2.x. I just set mine to 12 hours or daily and called it a day. If we could just have that back, that would solve the whole issue, I’d say.
Wow. I use ID only for backup since every privacy-friendly cloud service I’ve ever used has enough trouble with syncing that I can’t trust syncing for my most valuable files. I still use local checksum backups/syncs for security, with cloud just as a hope-I-won’t-need-it backup of backups. I’ve downloaded from ID cloud lots of files I thought were safely backed up (manual uploads) only to find on download that they are corrupted and useless. But how do I know which of the many files in the cloud are OK and which aren’t?
Mindboggling that in 2024 this is still the state of syncing/backing up. I love that ID has taken a hard stand against state intrusive anti-privacy policies, but, sadly, after years of using ID on Mac, Windows… I can’t recommend relying on it for file backup fidelity, let alone syncing.
@Abe Yup. Agreed on all points. Especially “Mindboggling that in 2024 this is still the state of syncing/backing up.”
I hate being this publicly poopy on the forums because I think the team are generally good folks who are trying to make a good product and service. And if it ever actually worked as intended, Icedrive’s sync feature would be a somewhat unique and more useful implementation than others I’ve seen in the space. But… yeeesh. Getting harder to keep the faith. I just can’t fathom how someone thought this was fit to ship in its current form. Especially since v3 was the proposed savior of all previous sync problems. And I’m beyond pissed to have to piece this together for myself, thinking back to the times the new app has silently crashed on various “sync” machines before I figured it out and re-opened it or restarted, and now realizing how much extra work I have to do just to patch up a basic functionality that any reasonable user would expect to exist in such an app. And finding out that it has been this way for nearly 2 months. And that the team has been aware of it and is “considering” approaches to remedy it. I’m at least lucky enough to have been aware of Icedrive’s long history of sync problems, and had an ear to the ground by reading these forums every once in a while. Can’t imagine how much more pissed I’d be if I was a newer user who had more trust in the system, depended on it for more, and used it for longer before realizing how flawed this implementation was. Hence this post.
I will be copying your strategy from here on out: doing all the sync work myself, using ID only as a backup of a backup of a backup and a “nice to have” but “not at all problematic if it completely disappears” backup. So it goes.
Is there any news on when this problem will be fixed?
Following the problems earlier in the year I have just spent ages (many, many weeks) deleting and setting up my sync pairs again. All seemed to be progressing well with night after night of enormous data exchanges. And now I have noticed that since then nothing has synced. I don’t want Icedrive running during the day because of the drain on my broadband and resources. I just want to run it at night from time to time when I know that enough has changed locally to make it worthwhile.
TL;DR version: mount icedrive as cloud drive and use a third party sync software like freefilesync to sync local and cloud. Ignore the IceDrive app’s “sync” feature until it’s properly fixed and leave that all to third party. This will work with unencrypted or encrypted stuff on IceDrive IF it was encrypted with the v3 versions of icedrive mount and sync. If the encrypted folders were created with prior versions of icedrive, you’ll probably want to delete all those from the cloud, re-create with v3, and then you should be able to see correclty matched filesizes with freefilesync or others. Good luck!
