Workspace Desktop functionality

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

I’d like to begin with an overview of my understanding of the service known as “Online File Folders” (OFF) from Go Daddy.

Online File Folders is basically off-site storage of your personal files. Workspace Desktop (WSD) is a tool offered by Go Daddy to transfer files, much like other file/folder synchronization applications such as Microsoft’s SyncToy or SynBack4all. However, these tools are incompatible with OFF.

The easiest and fastest way to upload files from your PC to OFF is by using an FTP client such as FireFTP, assuming you use Firefox. My testing indicates it’s 4-8 times faster than using WSD. The problem is (or my first question is), once you have the files/folders in OFF that have been ftp-ed, you can’t maintain the folder using WSD. It appears that in order to use OFF as a backup repository, the files & folders must be placed on the server using WSD. Is that correct?

There are some other limitations I have encountered using OFF and WSD which I have encountered that I’d like conformation on or suggestions for.

1. For many PC users, their email client is Microsoft Outlook. Outlook is designed in such a way that all the data in your Outlook application (emails, calendar, contacts, journal entries, etc.) are contained in one single .pst file. The contents of which is essentially “your life” in a file. Hence the desire for an off-site storage of that file. The problem is that this .pst file tends to grow quite large. Personally, I create separate .pst files every year, but they still grow to 1Gb or larger by around mid-year. To make matters worse, even if you simply open (and don’t make any changes) to an archived .pst file, Outlook marks it as having “changed”. A important status for any backup utility.

The issue with WSD (not OFF) is its ability to handle any file approaching 1Gb. It simply chokes and can even cause the entire “backup” process to abort in an error state. Not very nice when you just took 24 hours or more to “run” a backup!

A work-around is to bypass WSD and simply ftp the pst to a separate folder in OFF, but that creates other issues with regard to designing an efficient backup because it forces you to carve out your .pst files into separate folders so they don’t affect your primary backup. Ideally, you want to “backup” one folder. The more folders you have to create individual backups for, the more tedious the whole backup exercise becomes.

2. Another important source of data are several websites I created. When I go to create a new backup definition, WSD doesn’t even see the “My Websites” folder on my PC. Why is this?

staceyh said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator You’re correct, the files and folders would need to be uploaded using WSD to Online File Folder in order to manage them.

For your first question, Online File Folder doesn’t allow for uploads larger than 1GB, so this would be why you’re seeing issues with the upload speeds. It would be necessary to break up the file into smaller files in order to upload and store them through Online File Folder.

For your second question, you’ll need to check permissions on that folder or ensure it’s in a drive that’s accessible. If WSD doesn’t see it, then it usually indicates a permissions issue.

~Stacey

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

Thanks for your quick reply.

I am not aware of any special permissions on the “My Web Sites” folder. WSD simply doesn’t see the folder. It sits in the middle of a list of folders that WSD has no trouble seeing. Any other ideas.

mike42 said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator,

It might be possible that your Online File Folder may need a resync, which may be why you’re not able to see your website folder on your computer. You would want to contact our Support team directly for assistance with that:

http://support.godaddy.com/support/

Thanks.
–Mike

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

I am still uploading the contents of a folder that has been going for about 30 hours. I assume that we would want to wait until that has completed before requesting a “resync”.

mike42 said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator,

You may want to wait until your upload completes before proceeding with that. Typically, an upload should not take up to 30 hours unless it is an extremely large file, but you may want to wait until it completes before requesting a resync.

–Mike

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

I am uploading a folder (and sub-folders) containing 13.3Gb of photos. It began 42 hours ago and still appears to be running. When I say running, it’s because the slider bar is moving and the icon in the tray is animated. See a screen-shot here http://screencast.com/t/fFk4KV3O58mF

Notice the “Total” bar indicates the transfer is complete or near complete. It has looked like that for the last 24 hours.

I logged into Online File Folders, but I don’t know of any way to determine how much of the 13.3Gb are actually on the server. Is there any way to determine the folder size using OFF?

Do you think there is a problem given the data I have provided? How can we tell if the upload is actually still going on?

mike42 said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator,

With 13.3 GB of data, it may take quite a while for those files to upload, possibly up to a few days, assuming if you are at an upload speed of 512 kbps.

Online File Folder shouldn’t cancel the download, and hopefully your ISP doesn’t stop the download either. Some ISP’s may actually do that.

At this point, you’d need to wait until the upload completes to ensure that everything is there. If, for some reason, the upload does cancel on you, you may want to send in logs from your Online File Folder to our Support team for review:

http://support.godaddy.com/support/

–Mike

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

Is there any way to determine the folder size using OFF?

How can we tell if the upload is actually still going on?

timb said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator

As Mike suggested, our Support Team can review your current upload and inform you if it is still in process or stuck, not something you can easily determine from your end. This is the same for the folder size.

Tim B

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

In keeping with the topic of this thread, I’ll continue with additional questions relating to WSD.

Unless I’m mistaken, there has been some subtle changes in the new version of WSD. In previous versions you could create a folder pairing defined as a “Backup”. Then you could define how the backup was performed and where you wanted to put the folder in your OFF. In the latest version you can either “Sync” folders (Sync, Upload or Download) or Backup. If you chose to Backup, you have no options as to how the backup is done and you can’t specify where the folder is on the server. Do I have that right?

timb said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator

Yes, you are correct about the changes in the newer version.

Tim B

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

Does the new backup utility delete files on the server that are not in the source folder?

chrisg said 1 year, 7 months ago:

@senator,

Backups are a one-way sync. Meaning any extra content within your Online File Folder account should not be deleted simply cause it did not exist on the source folder you are creating the backup from.

Christopher G.

senator said 1 year, 7 months ago:

So does that mean if you have 20Mb file that you update daily, every day you are adding another 20Mb to the same folder?