Google drive bisync nearly always requires resync

[ajkessel (Adam Kessel)]

I'm running rclone 1.63.1 on Windows 10.0.19045.2846 to bisync with Google Drive. One-way sync works fine, but bisync gives me an error "Bisync aborted. Must run --resync to recover" nearly every time I execute it, even after the previous sync completed successfully. What can I do to troubleshoot? Is this a common problem?

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

please answer all the questions in the help and support template, so we can help you.

note: bisync is experimental and lost its maintainer.

Bisync should be considered experimental

I certainly agree with bisync being labeled as experimental. Full disclosure - I wrote and maintained the rclonesync-V2 origin tool that bisync is a tight re-implementation of. rclonesync-V2 has been in wide use going on 5 years (since 2017), with 337 GitHub stars and certainly many more downloads. My experience with rclonesync-V2, and more recently with bisync, says that the algorithm and safety features in bisync are pretty robust. If you are looking for a bidirectional sync utility, and u…

Bisync Bugs and Feature Requests

@nielash thank you for your thoughtful writeup. Unfortunately we've lost our bisync maintainer so this code is effectively unmaintained at the moment. Would you like to contribute to the maintenance of it? You appear to have a grip on the source which is great. Perhaps @jwink3101 you'd like to help too - perhaps we should be heading towards the syncrclone way of doing things? EIther way, I don't really have time to get to grips with the bisync source myself so I'm looking for help.

[kapitainsky]

There was a lot of work done recently to improve/fix bisync - try the latest beta as well.

[egrajeda]

I was having similar issues as well, and in my case (IIRC) telling bisync to not even try to sync Google Docs helped (since they were not kept in sync correctly anyway):

rclone bisync --drive-skip-gdocs ...

It might be worth a try.

[ajkessel (Adam Kessel)]

Thanks for the tips. I've updated to beta and added skip-gdocs. So far so good -- I will test over the next few days and report back if this appears to be a complete fix.

[nielash (Niel)]

@ajkessel

I've updated to beta and added skip-gdocs. So far so good

Love to hear that! If you run into any issues with the beta, I'm happy to help troubleshoot. (A log from you would be very helpful.)

In particular, you may want to check out the new --resilient mode, which allows bisync to retry certain recoverable errors on the next run, instead of requiring an unnecessary --resync.

@egrajeda

telling bisync to not even try to sync Google Docs helped (since they were not kept in sync correctly anyway)

I dug into this issue recently, and I believe I've identified the cause (Google Docs are intentionally skipped during normal bisync runs, but not during --resync.) I have a working local branch with full support for Google Docs, which would resolve this (track progress here.) Until then, I agree that including --drive-skip-gdocs is wise. (Note that this issue only affects actual Google Docs, not other types of files in Google Drive.)

[ajkessel (Adam Kessel)]

Thanks for your support! I've been running it every hour for a couple of days now without error. Will continue to test.