Quick question: I wish to share (from “laptop”) one huge (100GB) folder (“Album”, say) with another server (“cloud”), and parts of that folder (“Album/2019” and “Album/misc”, say) with another server (“desktop”).
To make things easy, I’ve added each subfolder separately (Album/2000, Album/2001, etc.) which is >20 folders, and shared each manually. Later I’ve seen that I could have shared Album with cloud but only Album/2019 with desktop (is it really so?).
So my first question: is it really so? My second question: performance-wise, is it better to split as I did (to 1-10GB folders), or make a single large folder (100GB, with some shared subfolders)? Or perhaps it doesn’t matter at all?
On the other hand something rather obvious that I missed regarding performance: If the size of the selectively shared subdirectories gets large, it’s obviously less performant to both share those and the parent dir as the subdirs get scanned twice.
I see, this is good to know. But perhaps I can make the full rescan interval of the large folder very large so most of the times only the subfolders (which can indeed be quite large) will be scanned.
And I should stop using “scan” as a general purpose thing: Scanning as in checking for changes by going over all files is not a headache anymore in normal setups (i.e. not stuff on network or the like), as it happens infrequently due to the filesystem watching, which immediately detects changes. What I was referring to is the hashing: When a change is detected, Syncthing needs to generate cryptographic hashes of the data. This will happen twice with sharing the parent dir and there’s no way around it.