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When a file is created or updated in a cloud drive, it is written in the local disk cache and uploaded asynchronously to ECS by default. Files are asynchronously uploaded to ECS based on a user-defined period after a file is last modified. For large files, a multi-part upload occurs such that the file is divided into parts and then is sent to ECS in parallel threads. This has the following benefits:
GeoDrive also offers synchronous uploads to ECS.
By default, after a file has been created or modified, the file is created or updated on local disk cache, and then uploaded by GeoDrive to ECS asynchronously. The client application will get an acknowledgment of the completed file operation request when the data has been written to the local disk cache. When a file in local cache has not been modified for a specified period, it is added to the queue to be uploaded as illustrated in Figure 2. The data is uploaded to ECS using the S3 API. The upload queue is processed as a background process.
Enabling synchronous upload eliminates the normal delay in uploading files to ECS. A file is immediately uploaded during the last close of the file. The benefit of using synchronous uploads is a reduction of the risk of data loss due to an unrecoverable Windows server or local disk cache failure. The downside is that the application will be held up during the last close of the file during the file upload. GeoDrive maintains a counter on the number of times a file is opened. When all applications accessing a file have done a close of the file, the GeoDrive service synchronously uploads the file to ECS. With synchronous uploads, clients will get file operation acknowledgment after the upload to ECS has completed. This is shown in Figure 3.