For a long time I’ve used OneDrive to sync all of my files and keep them safe, but I’ve been really getting into self hosting all my own services, so today I set up NextCloud to replace it. I told it to sync my OneDrive folder, and it did it’s best. It copied the file structure and had all the directories and everything but emptied every folder, it deleted every single file I had on my OneDrive, now all I have is empty folders.
Luckily OneDrive has a file recovery system where I can give it a time and date to revert back to so my data should all be safe, but why on earth did it do that in the first place? This was incredibly stressful and terrifying I thought I lost all my work. What did I do wrong?
Edit: I’ve identified the issue and have learned from this experience, it is now a non issue and was completely my own doing. Wary reader, learn from my cautionary tale
Comment that helped me figure it out https://lemmy.ca/comment/12912420
You can run into this issue with any two sync programs that operate on virtual files, as another commenter said. This isn’t specifically a OneDrive or NextCloud problem. You can safely run both at the same time on the same machine, as long as they are syncing entirely separate directories.
That being said, this is obscure enough that I feel like there should be some kind of check in these clients to make sure they’re not about to interfere with each other - users aren’t gonna know to check for this, especially since these clients are hiding what they’re actually doing behind the scenes!