Duplicates on Google Drive are silently both deleted

[guy-rouillier]

Somehow (I don't believe through Rclone Browser), I ended up with duplicate file names on Google Drive. In a directory several levels below the top level, I had two files name "1117", two named "117", etc. I think I had bout 10 dups altogether.

I got rid of most of them using the web interface to Google Drive. But then I discovered that Rclone Browser had a Google Drive tab that was much faster than the web interface, so I tried deleting a duplicate there. I selected one of the dups, then clicked the Delete button in the top row. That appeared to work; one of the duplicates disappeared, leaving only 1. However, when I went back to the Google Drive web interface, it reported that both duplicate files has been deleted.

Below is a small part of the Activity List on My Drive page. The lower set are the ones I deleted from the Google Drive web interface. Notice only one of each is listed. I verified by refreshing the page that the remaining instances still existed. The upper set reflects the one delete I did through Rclone Browser on the gdrive tab (that's how I named the Google Drive remote in rclone.conf). Notice that both instances of 117 are listed. Indeed, when I ran the rclone task again, it told me 117 would be transferred as it wasn't on Google Drive.

This is a fairly serious issue, as both duplicates are silently removed, so the user doesn't know. Of course, ideally, duplicates would never be possible on Google Drive. But that's a different issue.

[EDIT] I did a little more experimenting with this. I don't know how I managed to get duplicates on Google Drive in the first place, but now that I'm trying, the only way I can force this to happen is to upload the same file a second time. In doing so, the upload will rename the 2nd copy something like file(1).txt. I can then use the Google Drive web interface to rename file(1).txt to file.txt. I obviously didn't intentionally do this when I got a whole bunch of dups, so something in either the Google Drive web interface or rclone allowed this to happen. Doing all that, I can then repeat the experiment of deleting one of the two copies from Rclone Browser, and both copies getting deleted in Google Drive.

I then installed RaiDrive (https://www.raidrive.com/). It was not tripped by my renaming. It continued to see the original name, so that when I deleted one of the two copies, it deleted just one of them, using the appropriate original (distinct) name. I'd like to see what RaiDrive will do with honest-to-goodness duplicate file names, i.e. dups from when the files are first uploaded, not only from a rename. But I have serious doubts that I'll ever figure out how to recreate that.