Syncing and offline use

A drive in File Explorer is a two-way sync between its folder on your PC and the drive itself. CloudMount’s sync engine runs rclone in the background, uploads what you change, and brings in what changes elsewhere.

Your changes

• New and edited files upload automatically. CloudMount waits until a file has been quiet for two seconds, so a file still being written isn’t uploaded half-finished. A file that’s still open for writing is retried every few seconds.
• Changes are queued on disk. If you restart, sign out or lose the connection, queued changes pick up where they left off; a file that was partly uploaded is uploaded again from the start. CloudMount also notices files you changed while it wasn’t running.
• Up to four uploads run at the same time per drive.
• Failures are retried, forever. The wait between attempts grows from two seconds to five minutes. After five failures the item shows Couldn’t sync in Explorer and the Activity page says why.
• Office-style saves keep the file’s identity. Apps like Word save by writing a temporary file and swapping it in. CloudMount uploads the new contents over the original, so on Google Drive or OneDrive the file keeps its version history and sharing.
• Some files are never uploaded: ~$*, .~lock.*, desktop.ini, thumbs.db and .DS_Store. When an app saves by renaming to a .tmp name and back, CloudMount waits for the save to finish.

Rename, move and delete

• Renames, moves and deletes happen on the drive straight away. If the drive refuses one, for example because you don’t have permission, Explorer shows an error and nothing changes on your PC. If the network is slow or down, the change is made on your PC and queued for the drive.
• Deleting a folder deletes its contents on the drive too, including files in subfolders you never opened. Files that changed on the drive since you last saw them are kept and reported as conflicts.
• Moving a folder never overwrites. If a file with the same name is already there, the moved one is kept next to it under a conflict name.
• The Recycle Bin. Deleting to the Recycle Bin makes Windows download the whole file into the bin first, and CloudMount deletes it from the drive about ten seconds later. Restoring it from the bin uploads it again as a new file. Shift+Delete deletes without downloading.

Server-side moves and copies

Renames and moves within one drive happen on the server where the backend supports it (see each backend’s page). Copying, or dragging between two CloudMount drives, goes through your PC: the file downloads and uploads again.

Changes made elsewhere

CloudMount finds out about changes made on the website, another device or another app in a few ways:

How	Which drives	How soon
Change notifications	Google Drive, OneDrive (not the China region), Dropbox (not with the shared_files or shared_folders options), Box, pCloud, Huawei Drive, Pixeldrain, iCloud Photos, and drives that wrap them	About 15 seconds
Checking when you open a folder	All	About a second after you open it, at most once a minute per folder
Regular checks of recent folders	All	Every poll interval: 5 minutes by default
A rolling check of other folders	All	25 more folders each interval

Folders you’ve used in the last hour count as recent. Folders you’ve never opened aren’t checked, because they haven’t been listed yet. A file moved on the drive shows up as deleted in one place and new in the other.

Drives without change notifications have a Changes on the drive setting on their page, with intervals from one minute to an hour. Every drive has Check now, and the Drives page has Check for changes now.

The backend pages list which services report changes, under Change notifications.

Conflicts

When a file changed both on your PC and on the drive before either change synced, CloudMount keeps both:

• The version from the drive keeps the original name.
• Your version is renamed name (conflict YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS).ext and uploaded next to it.

Other cases:

• You changed it, it was deleted on the drive: your version is uploaded again and the conflict is recorded.
• You deleted it, it changed on the drive: the changed version comes back as an online-only file.

The Activity page and each drive’s page list conflicts, with Show to open the folder and Dismiss to clear the entry.

Offline

When the drive can’t be reached, CloudMount marks it Offline and keeps trying, from every five seconds up to every two minutes. While offline:

• Downloaded files open normally.
• Online-only files can’t open; Explorer reports an error.
• Your changes, renames and deletes are queued and sync when the drive is back.

Pausing

Pause syncing in the tray menu or Settings pauses every drive for 2, 8 or 24 hours, or until you resume; in the Explorer flyout it pauses until you resume. The pause survives a restart. While paused, uploads, deletes and moves wait and CloudMount stops checking for changes, but opening a file still downloads it.

Pausing automatically on metered connections and in battery saver is planned.

When a drive’s settings point somewhere else

If you change a drive’s settings so it points at different data, such as another account, bucket or folder, syncing it could make the two sides disagree badly. CloudMount detects this and pauses the drive: Paused: its settings changed. Choose Accept and resume only if the drive still points to the same files.

Space on your PC

Downloaded files stay until you free up space. There’s no automatic size limit; instead:

• Right-click → Free up space in Explorer, for a file or folder.
• Free up space on a drive’s page, for the whole drive. Files you’ve set to always keep, and files with changes waiting, stay. The page lists what you’ve set to always keep, with Stop keeping for each.
• Windows Storage Sense can make files you haven’t used in a while online-only again. Settings → Space on this PC opens it.

Stop showing a drive

Stop showing in File Explorer (from the drive’s menu) removes the folder from Explorer and stops syncing it. CloudMount deletes the synced copies on your PC; files on the drive itself aren’t touched. Files with changes that haven’t uploaded stay in the folder, and CloudMount offers to open it.

Remove drive does the same and then deletes the drive from CloudMount.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling removes CloudMount’s settings and drive configuration and the folders’ link to the drives. Downloaded files and changes that never uploaded stay behind as ordinary files; online-only files disappear from your PC. Nothing is deleted from your drives, but changes that never uploaded are never uploaded, so let the Activity page’s Waiting to sync list empty before you uninstall.