Oh, look, Synology just put out a major new upgrade of their Synology Drive Client app, from 7.5.2 to 8.0.0, and what a surprise, there’s another data-loss bug in it, at least on Linux! [previously, previously]
The bug is quite easy to reproduce:
- Set up Synology Drive Client 8.0.0 on two Linux machines, machA and machB.
- On machA, create a directory in your Drive.
- Observe that the new directory is synchronized to your Drive on machB within a few seconds.
- On machB, create a file inside the new directory.
- Observe that the file you created inside the new directory is not synchronized to your NAS or back to machA.
The file you just created won’t be synchronized until/unless you quit and restart Drive Client on machB. If, in the meantime, you create a file of the same name on machA, you will have a conflict situation to deal with, which you may not notice. If you were relying on your NAS as the backup of the files in your Drive, then you may very well lose data, e.g., if something happens to machB or if you accidentally delete the file before restarting Drive Client.
Synology Drive Client on Linux uses the kernel inotify feature to get notified about files that are added to or deleted from your Drive, and clearly there is a bug in the new version that is causing it to forget to add inotify watches to directories created via synchronization from the NAS.
There is no workaround I know of except to downgrade to version 7.5.2 and not upgrade until they fix the bug.
I have reported the bug to Synology. Who knows if/when they will fix it.
