nextcloud / android

📱 Nextcloud Android app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nextcloud.client
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Synced Files Deleted From Phone After Short While #12122

Open gohrner opened 9 months ago

gohrner commented 9 months ago

⚠️ Before posting ⚠️

Steps to reproduce

  1. Syncronize a bigger folder from Nextcloud to the phone

Expected behaviour

The synced files stay available offline indefinitely.

Actual behaviour

The files disappear from the phone again after a while and are no longer shown as "synced" (and also are not available any more e.g. in the photo gallery, in my case Google Fotos, not logged in and without any syncing)

Android version

13

Device brand and model

Samsung A52

Stock or custom OS?

Stock

Nextcloud android app version

observed with 3.24.2

Nextcloud server version

unsure which it was at the time

Using a reverse proxy?

Yes

Android logs

No response

Server error logs

No response

Additional information

We experienced this problem for quite a while until we asked about it in the Nextcloud forum: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/android-app-3-24-2-synced-files-deleted-from-phone-after-short-while/161571/1

Meanwhile there was at least one confirmation from a different user who also experienced it.

Meanwhile, we seem to have found a workaround - there were several settings in Android (or maybe Samsung extensions?) regarding “saving storage space for incative apps”. Not sure how they were called in detail, but it was two or three different settings, some related to the app cache, some to application data.

We disabled all of these for the Nextcloud client and now the synced files stay. We’re not sure which one of these settings actually did the trick, but didn’t invest any further time either - we wasted enough of it on the issue already. :frowning:

So it seems to be some Android cleanup feature, but it would be really good if the Nextcloud app could warn prominently about it and provide instructions on how and where to disable this stuff…

Most regular users would simply come to the conclusion "this stupid app just doesn't work" and quickly turn to some other syncing / cloud storage solution, which is unfortunate.

joshtrichards commented 9 months ago

What do you have your Data Storage Folder set to?

And can you browse to that folder in your phone's Files app directly?

In Google Photos:

P.S. I assume you Google Photos built-in Backup option disabled, correct?

P.P.S. I can't reproduce this, but mostly because I can't see those photos in Google Photos, only in the Google Files App so I suspect there's a storage difference / we're looking at different sets of files.

gohrner commented 9 months ago

@joshtrichards: Thanks for your quick reaction.

The fotos appear in the Google Photo app "main page", i.e. directly after opening it.

So if I just open the app (and in this case scroll down a bit because the photos are not too recent), I'll see:

image

These photos were synced from Nextcloud.

The details for e.g. the image in the top left corner of the previous screenshot look as follows:

image

Regarding Google Photos "Backup", you're right, its disabled, and no account is logged in / connected.

The "automagic removal" of the synced images is either a feature of later Android's or something Samsung specific - the other user in the forum also uses a Samsung, and I've never experienced deleted images / files on a Nokia 8 Sirocco with Android One, Android version 10.

The Samsung A52 described above isn't my device - as my Nokia had hardware issues, I recently switched to a Fairphone 5 with Android 13, but was not brave enough to leave the Nextcloud "storage saving" settings on default settings, but disabled them all. With this setting I also didn't encounter any deleted data on my Fairphone.