BT Cloud

[BigBarney]

I have decided to give BT Cloud a try as an alternative to Google Photos etc.

I seem to be able to access the service via my browser but I have downloaded and installed the desktop app which doesn't work at all.

The shortcut is on my desktop but clicking on it, nothing happens. I have tried it with admin privileges etc but no joy.

I am using Windows 10 Home 20H2.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

There is a known problem with the cloud app at the moment, the last time I looked the thread on here was over 800 posts long

Edit: See https://community.bt.com/t5/Broadband-Extras-Apps-from-BT/BT-Cloud-Won-t-Start/m-p/2117275#M40736

[BigBarney]

Thanks for that.

[JTS1]

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@BigBarneywrote:

I have decided to give BT Cloud a try as an alternative to Google Photos etc.

I seem to be able to access the service via my browser but I have downloaded and installed the desktop app which doesn't work at all.

The shortcut is on my desktop but clicking on it, nothing happens. I have tried it with admin privileges etc but no joy.

I am using Windows 10 Home 20H2.

---

Did you every get started on BT Cloud. if not, can I help you?

JTS1

[BigBarney]

It would appear that it is not worth the effort.

I will stick with Google until BT get it sorted!

[str8chat]

I have done quite a lot of experimenting with BT Cloud over the last month or so.

The old version used to work well. When the desktop client was running, File Explorer put coloured dots on the icons for the folders and files that were included in the list of items to transfer to the Cloud. The colour of the dot showed whether that item was waiting for transfer, currently being transferred or was now backed up to the Cloud. That has disappeared.

I have found that using the new desktop client did not make any new files visible in the "All My Files" option on the BT Cloud website.

I cleared down my Cloud storage and tried a complete new upload using the desktop client. I had about 48 GB of data in over 14000 files, which were in around 600 folders. After about 10 hours the upload finished. The Settings option on the web site showed there was supposedly around 40 GB of data in the Cloud, but "All My Files" reported that there was NO DATA present.

I stopped the client, cleared down the Cloud again, and this time I dragged and dropped the same branch of the PC's file system into the Upload option on the web site. After a further 10 hours that finished, and I could now see my folders and files in "All My Files". I looked through perhaps a dozen of my 600 folders and just in those few folders I spotted three empty files. The names were there but the data was missing. I repeated the experiment, and this produced a different set of empty files so the upload had failed rather than it being down to bad files.

I repeated all of the above on a totally different PC with similar results.

My next thought was to download the whole backup from the Cloud onto a PC and use some simple Linux scripts to identify files that had not restored correctly. However, there appears to be no option to download more than a single folder and its immediate contents. There is no way to download a complete branch of the folder structure or the entire Cloud backup. I am not going to spend hours selecting and downloading 600 separate folders and their contents.

Then I decided to do the basic step of RTFM. Yet another failure. I clicked on the Help link from the drop down menu that appears from my account name. What did I get? A 404 error - Page Not Found.

What do the BT adverts say? Something like Speed, Signal Strength and Security. Well, Security seems to have gone right out of the Window as far as BT Cloud is concerned.

[Jonny21]

Hi 

I am having huge problems in understanding how BT cloud works. For example, I am running out of disc space because somehow BT cloud has made two duplicate sets of folder on my C drive taking up 83 and 53 GBs respectively in addition to the actual folders. Why? I thought it stored everything on a cloud not my C drive? Aslo the two sets are not the same as evidenced by the different sizes. What' going on?

[Addy]

I have a similar BT cloud issue posted elsewhere BT Cloud issue. where the folder structure is created in BT CLoud but it states no data found when I look in All My Files. Also images were not showing up in Photos and Videos although the image files were in All My Files but it said the file type was not recognised. 

The image issue I think is BT Cloud doesn’t like file extensions in capital letters. If I change the file extension from .JPG to .jpg it would upload the files.

However any file type I try and synch now doesn’t appear on BT Cloud although it appears to be uploading  the files. 

[str8chat]

It all seemed to change around December 2020.

I have found three ways of uploading data to BT Cloud (BTC):

1. Using the "Backup" tab in the Desktop App (for Windows). This allows the selected folder(s) to be uploaded, although exactly what gets uploaded is very vague and as @Addy says "All My Files" suggest there is no data, although individual section views "Photos & Videos", "Music", "Documents" and "Contacts" do show content as single flat lists of file. Not helpful as I have around ten thousand photos and videos. Also, not at all useful when I have different folders with photos in, and a text file as the "Index" in certain folders. The "Index" files all appear as documents with no way of relating the index to the photos they are listing. Since "All My Files" is empty, this upload method is close to useless, and other files such as .dat or .iso files cannot be seen at all.

2. The second method is to use the "Upload" button on the web page when logged in to BTC from an Internet browser. This time the uploaded files (all types) appear to be recognised and the files and the folder structure containing them all appear in "All My Files". However, a small percentage of the files are empty. Clearing down and trying again can produce a different selection of empty files.

3. The third option is to use the "Sync" tab in the Desktop App. This tab says it is to make the BTC contents available on the computer. What it does not say is that this is a two way exchange. Files in BTC can be loaded onto the computer, but also in the target folder structure any new files get passed to BTC. This seems to be the most reliable option. Folders and files appear in "All My Files", and empty files do not seem to be created.

I have now adopted a process of copying files from the computer to BTC, then exiting the desktop App. Next I rename the top level folder to a new name. Then I restart the App and go to the "Sync" tab where I have to set up to sync again to a another new folder (it can be the original name) as the App recognises the original folder has gone. This downloads everything from BTC into the new folder. (I have plenty of disk space to hold both the original upload and the downloaded read-back. Then I boot into a Ubuntu Live Linux system and run the following script:

NAME="`pwd`"
NAME=`basename "$NAME"`

find . -type f|while read -r line
do
sum -s "$line"
done|while read num1 num2 rest
do
echo $rest $num1 $num2
done|tee ~/sumcheck.tmp

sort ~/sumcheck.tmp >~/"$NAME".sumcheck
rm ~/sumcheck.tmp

This creates a file called folder_name.sumcheck in the home directory of the user (I use root) that is running the script. I do this on both the original and read-back folders and then do a diff command to look for differences. This way I can see quickly if any of my 10,000 or so files is different when copied back from BTC.

I find some Windows system files such as "thumbs.db" and "desktop.ini" do not appear in the read-back, but I normally remove these before performing the upload.

Incidentally, @Addy with methods 2 and 3 above I have not had any problems with .jpg versus .JPG. It is possible this is a bug for the Apple clients as I believe Apple operating systems are based on Linux and are case sensitive, unlike Windows.

The final bummer with BTC is clicking on the "Help" link accessed by clicking on my name on the web page and choosing Help from the drop-down menu. This comes up with a 404 (page not found) type error. I reported all these findings to BT by email and phone around three months ago but Speed along with Security does not seem to be in their vocabulary.

@Jonny21I hope some of this is useful for you.

@BigBarneyThe App (in Windows) puts a little icon in the overflow area for my system tray. If I click on that I can access Settings (the cog wheel) or other options (three dots). I don't have it running by default as I am selective about what goes in the cloud and that is mainly data I am archiving for long term storage, and I choose when I do a sync with the cloud.

[str8chat]

I have been running the latest version of the BT Cloud Windows desktop client this weekend. Fortunately, my broadband is not capped as I have probably wasted around 80 GB of download time with this new version.

There were a couple of reasons for this:

1. Although I set the Sync folder to be on D:, which is a large partition with lots of space, it appears that the App actually downloads into temporary space on C:, which on the particular PC is a significantly smaller partition as it normally holds only the Windows 10 and the actual applications. Data is normally stored on D:. It seems that the App downloads onto C: and then moves the files to my actual target folder when they have been validated.

2. I don't remember this next bit occurring with previous versions I have used, but this new version seems to want to download multiple files in parallel. Unfortunately I have a number of video files in the cloud, exactly as they came from the camera, and as these are around 2 GB each they take up a lot of space on C: when several are being downloaded in parallel. It appears that when a number of these files are being downloaded together, spare space on C: gets reduced to the point where the transfers all fail as there is insufficient space for them. The App clears down the partial files and starts again downloading the same files. This cycle seems to keep repeating. I cannot see there is much speed advantage in having multiple transfers in parallel when single transfers sequentially are probably not much slower. The limiting factor for most people will be their broadband speed.

I have also seen photo files with names like 100_0123.JPG, where it shows what appear to be two copies of each file being downloaded in parallel. As soon as it gets to a file name starting with a letter, it goes back to showing just one download of each.

Anyway, I have had to put the client App on a different PC with a much bigger C: so I can read down the whole of my BT Cloud to make sure all the files are okay. I will run my script (given in a previous post on this thread) on the original computer and the files it uploaded and on the second computer with the files it is downloading to allow me to check for discrepancies.