I have a job setup in which a remote drive is mirrored / updated to another remote drive. When I ran a compare on this job, it ended with showing me that it was going to delete everything on the target drive, deleting as they only appear on the right. But the reality is that I forgot to connect the source drive. It is my opinion that the job should have failed / aborted upon clicking compare as the compare cannot be done without both the source and target. This anomaly could easily lead to the accidental deletion of a lot of data.
For my scenario, source drive is a NAS and target drive is a USB HD.
Detection of remote media not available
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FFS will fail to run the sync in this case. Aborting the comparison however would be premature.
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There was no indication it would fail to run, it gave me the dialog indicating that clicking ok would do a mass deleting. I think aborting is not at all premature as the entire left side path is not there. If you do not have an entire side available, nothing should be run, at least in my opinion, as there is nothing to compare, mirror or update. Such a function requires a source and a target.
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Yes, there's no indication, that's probably the only design issue here. I'm not sure how such an indication should look like or if it's needed at all. Maybe it is needed, after all the situation did look a bit scary.
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I do not intend to say I do not trust you... but I see that you have identified the concern of how it appears. It sure raised a flag to me, making me think I am glad I caught it before messing up a lot of data.
My initial thought, as ignorant as it might be as it is centered on my experience only, was that once I click on Compare, it provides a dialog indicating that two volumes, a left and a right (or source and target) must be selected and present in order to compare. Obviously it would need to scan to some degree to identify that there is nothing to load (as in my case no files were on the left as the entire path was not there), but I was thinking that once the program is aware that an entire side is empty or non existent, any further action does not make sense. If that is in fact intended, the logical operation is simply to delete the target in its entirety, no need to compare or sync anything.
My initial thought, as ignorant as it might be as it is centered on my experience only, was that once I click on Compare, it provides a dialog indicating that two volumes, a left and a right (or source and target) must be selected and present in order to compare. Obviously it would need to scan to some degree to identify that there is nothing to load (as in my case no files were on the left as the entire path was not there), but I was thinking that once the program is aware that an entire side is empty or non existent, any further action does not make sense. If that is in fact intended, the logical operation is simply to delete the target in its entirety, no need to compare or sync anything.
