[Owncloud] How I just lost 2/3 of my files to the sync-client

[Jakub Moscicki]

Hello,

For using the owncloud client in professional context ("enterprise") the absolute requirement is that things like this do not happen.  I think that this should be addressed in priority. The question is how we achieve it.

Recovering from backup should be really the last resort. To support 100s or 1000s of users we cannot ask them to follow a procedure on their side to disable one sync client and alike. This is proven not to work. The client update should be transparent and safe. We currently have users with different client versions (some as old as 1.4.2). I currently have little confidence in what will happen when they upgrade their clients. I will most likely have to assist them one by one. From experience anything can happen (config file messed up, complete redownload,…). This is not always the problem of the client only (server has it's part in it too) but the net result is what matters.

The owncloud server has two versions (community = latest greatest, enterprise = stable plus critical bugfixes, sometimes backported from community). Why don't we have the same for the owncloud client? If we had, then I would be more confident that an (automatic) update from 1.5.0 to 1.5.x will do no harm. Because 1.5 has the "enterprise" stability. And because the owncloud devs would not put any potentially dangerous changes in it. And we (people deploying owncloud for their users) can control when we switch from 1.5 to 1.6 (or skip 1.6 and go to 1.7).  Of course there should be a very clear meaning on backwards compatibility in the numbering scheme. And very clear update paths between major versions if needed.

Concretely, what about having isv:ownCloud:desktop-enterprise repository for Linuxes and a separate download channel for Windows/Mac for client enterprise version?

Additionally, if we can settle on a core which is guaranteed stable I am willing to restrict the set of features to our users at the benefit of stability and security (for example, only one sync folder pair to sync the entire owncloud account). I think this should also be considered, until the owncloud client has matured enough with all the offered features. I would accept  the "dangerous" features to be disabled in the enterprise.

Best regards,

kuba

--


I think that first of all the (owncloud) project must make sure that this is much less likely to happen at all. I imagine us having soon several hundreds users 

On Feb 5, 2014, at 11:29 PM, Andrew Warren <awarren at synaptics.com> wrote:

> Benjamin Schieder wrote:
> 
>> I was able to restore the files from another machines sync directory,
>> but it was very scary nonetheless.
> 
> Thank you for the warning, Benjamin.
> 
> Reading the sentence I quoted above, it now seems obvious (although I had never thought to do this before) that when upgrading the sync client or the Owncloud server -- or making any large change to the synced directories -- it is probably a really good idea to temporarily disable syncing to one client in order to protect its synced directory from being corrupted if anything goes wrong.
> 
> I mean... I have server snapshots taken every four hours, and my clients are backed up regularly, but the backup files are (intentionally) not easy to access, and they can of course be up to four hours old.  And besides, a backup that occurs halfway through a sync or while a file is open might not be perfect anyway.
> 
> For these reasons, I have in the past made a temporary copy of one client's synced directory just before upgrading the client or server.  But lately, my synced directory is so large that finding disk space (and time) for a copy is difficult.  Disabling the sync client on a machine that is already synced takes no time and no extra disk space, and it preserves an up-to-the-minute, internally consistent backup that can be easily copied back to the server if necessary.
> 
> I haven't looked at the Owncloud documentation lately, but I assume that it says (maybe in multiple places) something like "It is recommended to have a recent backup whenever making a large change to your system".  Perhaps it would be helpful to also suggest temporarily disabling one sync client.
> 
> -Andrew
> 
> === Andrew Warren  - awarren at synaptics.com
> === Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
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