After a failed RPi OS upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie, I decided to roll back to the previous version, by using an SD card image I made.
In the mean time, I had made a few changes to files. All synchronized files are on an external HDD. So none of the synchronized files were affected by the roll-back, only the Syncthing DB.
Now comes the part I don’t understand:
Even files which weren’t changed since I made the backup are still being listed as “Changed” on the RPi.
I’ve checked some of these files on the RPi and compared it with another system, and these files indeed are identical in terms of size, name and last changed date.
Given that the DB should also have these files saved in this state, why does Syncthing say the file has changed?
I assume this has to do with the watchdog that checks for file changes on the directory tree? Should this really be the expected behavior?
Do you mean that you have reverted the Syncthing database to an older version from a backup? If yes, then this is completely unsupported and will definitely cause problems (which I’ve myself also experienced in the past). If that’s indeed the case, then I would suggest removing the current database and letting Syncthing rebuild it.
I think in both cases it had 2.10 as version, but yes, everything except the files that were to synchronize was affected by the backup.
I had likened it to the case that the HDD had been removed and used on another PC for a while, since on the HDD the only files I could find regarding Syncthing were the folder marker and the older versions. So I had expected that with a full scan, it would see some files changed, and everything would be fine otherwise.
I.e. I thought files that had changed since the backup would be flushed to the other PCs, or maybe create a sync-conflict file. But even the files that weren’t touched at all since the backup were for some reason seen as “newer” on the RPi.