Hi Darshan,
I came here to complain about the same issue and found this post. I will try to continue the conversation.
I'm sorry but I think this functionality makes no sense at all. It creates great havoc and nonsense on our own organization and I will try to elaborate on that.
Bidirectional Sync should be what it means: what happens in one direction should be reflected on the other direction. If this isn't what's happening that will cause extra steps in the workflow that have to be taken in order to perform simple actions. We have endured this nuissance since ever and it's really awkard.
Most importantly the fact is that this behaviour was causing more problems to us than erroneous deletion of files. We were having a LOT of file and folder duplicates, that noone understood why they were there. Before we understood what was happening, this created great organizational confusion and file versioning issues because even with a small team of people trialing Trimble Connect, we were working on files that shouldn't be there and working on different versions without knowing.
I really think you should reconsider these concerns as this is the main reason we are not using Trimble Connect by more than one user at our office.
Local Transfer is not a solution because that will ignore the changes made in the cloud, which seldomly happen but do happen sometimes and in critical occasions. We cannot risk deleting the changes made directly on cloud versions because of mirroring the local files into cloud.
This issue is also stemming from you trying to solve a problem that might not be there, and that is not your own responsibility. When a user deletes files and folders that he shouldn't delete, that is his/her own responsability.
You have to trust your users will know what they are doing when they decide to erase a folder. You also have to trust that, eventual erroneous deletion of files and folders will be able to be restored from trimble connect activity menu.
If you are concerned of eventual mistakes from users, you shouldn't enforce the way they must solve those issues. You should, instead issue warnings, while syncing, that several files and folders will be deleted. These warnings should be optional and should be allowed to be skipped automatically if that is the user wish. As a safe measure, users should be recommended that the warnings should be carefully taken into account and, by default, sync should halt the syncing process when finding file deletion, or folder deletion or both.
That would be both wise and safe and wouldn't mean you'd treat your clients as childish or foolish.
It would yield predictable results and, therefore, would be the right procedure/workflow.
Also it happens way more often that we delete files and folders from cloud than from windows/mac/ipad explorers. In the cloud we can select multiple files and folders from multiple different folders and the selection is persistent. This results inthe fact that sometimes we are not aware of a wrong selection we are making on the cloud and we delete folders that we are not looking at. Those deletions are really permanent and are transferred to all computers using Trimble Connect Sync, so they are really dangerous too. I don't se you concerned about that.
I hope you consider all I'm saying here and think about changing Sync and, while you're at it consider changing how file selections and deletions work in the cloud app:
- Bidirectional syncing should behave as expected;
- Deletion of files and folders via trimble connect sync should be able to be restored in the activity menu
- If you want to allow this bidirectional deletion as a new option for your existing users, your default should still be the current behaviour
- Bidirectional deletion should be the default behaviour for new users as this is, imho, the natural behaviour
- Warnings and safeguards should be in place on trimble connect sync when files and folders are being deleted from both directions
- These warnings should be active by default and can be used to halt syncing processes but that they should be able to be turned off
- There should be a way of reinforcing activity warnings from after files and folders have been deleted by syncing
- The workflow for file selections and deletions in the cloud app is very unnatural for windows, mac and tablet users and creates way more problems than trimble connect sync (all the problems we had from deleting files were all caused on the cloud app)
Thank you for your patience in reading this and thanks in advance for any reply and eventual updates on the app based on this feedback.