Strange interaction with Box drive

I keep my files on a mounted Box drive (my Uni provides this service). There seems to be a strange interaction between RStudio and the Box drive. Box constantly issues messages about renaming conflicts. Its as though RStudio is doing something odd with file/directory metadata. This does not happen with any other application I use regularly. Does anyone else have this issue? Thanks.

Box Drive

Does the problem described here look like the issue you’re having?

The advice there is mostly to just file a ticket with Box, so perhaps not helpful.

The “something odd” that RStudio might be doing is if you’re working with an Rstudio project and/or git, a number of hidden files get created and updated as you work with your project. (Other drive sync services like google-drive and Dropbox tend not to have such syncing issues, but also I hear many people use box and rstudio without issue)

Does box provide an error log or set of messages that might help diagnose the issue?

https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Box-Drive-and-RStudio-Projects/td-p/57712

Yes, I found that same post in the Box community after posting here.

I may have found a surprisingly simple fix. I got fed up with warnings and so started to copy my RStudio project folder out of my Box Drive. The folder is so big that I gave up after 10 minutes or so. But when I subsequently reopened the project on Box Drive, I did not get any warnings/messages.

So here is what I believe might be happening. Box Drive caches on demand. So you can potentially open a folder and it may take awhile for the entire contents to appear. If you write a file with the same name as a file that is being reloaded from the remote Box server, you will, I assume, get a conflict warning. By attempting to copy the folder out of Box Drive, I might have forced Box Drive to cache the entire folder contents locally.

It seems the real fix might be for Box to implement a method to force a folder to sync up before writing anything into the folder. This is a guess but consistent with the behavior I just described.

Thanks for looking into this.

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