DATA LOSS occurs if resync an old folder, and then turn it off again

[Christopher Barrington-Leigh]

I am so furious. I am not going to make this reproducible, but here is at least a record of one guess at how to cause massive data loss through normal use of ubuntuone.

I synced a folder, months ago. Ubuntuone was awful, so I unsynced it (turned off / delinked it / etc in the ubuntoone controls)

Recently I turned it back on. It renamed all the new files with a .u1conflict suffix, and overwrote the good ones with the ancient versions.

It was a massive amount of work to clean up the mess. I didn't get to all of them before turning the sync back off, since clearly ubuntuone was still awful.
However, I suspect that when delinked, it decided to delete all the .u1conflict files?!?!?
because they are now gone and I have a massive data loss of months of programming.

(Well, I can with an obscene amount of fiddly work to ensure the versions are the right ones, since I can no longer tell which files ubuntuone messed with and which it didn't, use backups to get back some of those months.)

Dropbox was prpobably syncing the folder at the same time. Maybe that caused the problem, instead? I don't know, but Dropbox behaved perfectly, and is in fact my best backup, I suspect, since it keeps old copies, unlike U1.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: ubuntuone-client 1.6.2-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-12.51-generic 2.6.38.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-12-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Oct 24 14:37:42 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntuone-client
UbuntuOneSyncdaemonExceptionsLog:

UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)