drop-upload: optionally unlink locally deleted files from upload directory

[davidsarah]

The prototype implementation of drop-upload in #1429 adds new or changed files in the local directory to the upload directory, but it does not unlink files in the upload directory when they are deleted locally.

Note that:

• some users might not want files to be immediately unlinked from the upload directory, in case the local deletion was accidental.
• the space for unlinked files would not be reclaimed unless and until garbage collection is performed. (This applies already to old versions of changed files.)

[davidsarah]

On 06/04/12 03:20, erpo4 wrote on the vg2 list:

davidsarah wrote:

erpo4 wrote:

I think the drop_upload feature is what I want. Files I put in the local directory seem to be uploaded to the grid. However, when I delete the files out of my local directory, the files are not automatically deleted from the grid. Is this the expected behavior?

Yes, it is. I've just filed <​https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1710> to allow the automatic deletion behaviour. (This isn't likely to be a priority to support in the next couple of releases, though, unless someone volunteers to implement it.)

Just to be clear: I wasn't complaining. :) The only reason I asked was that it's not the behavior I'm used to from other cloud storage services (e.g. Ubuntu One). It may actually be preferable not to autodelete files that have been removed from the drop_upload directory. In the case that I accidentally rm -rf /drop_upload_dir/*, I wouldn't want that to wipe out my online backups when tahoe gets inotify'd. If this is to be a feature, perhaps it should default to off?

It would indeed default to off, since we don't want the behaviour to change surprisingly from the current behaviour on a Tahoe upgrade.