Debugging sync conflicts appearing on an android device

I’m using syncthing on multiple devices (laptop, 2x Raspberry pi, android tablet, and android phone). On the android tablet, where I write notes, which then sync to all other devices. The relevant files are all PDF files.

Very often I get sync conflicts appearing. The resulting conflict file name includes the modified by ID, which is the android tablet.

As far as I know, the tablet is the only device that’s modifying this file. For some conflicts I am confident that no other device had the file open (certainly not open by a user).

My questions:

  1. How can I understand what is causing the conflicts?
  2. Related – is there a way to see on which the conflict was first detected? I’m expecting something like the modification by device XXA conflicts with that of device XXB.

Note – I have read somewhere that there can be issues connecting android devices, so my two android devices do not sync directly (they are both connected to the laptop & 2xRPi).

Android and rpi usually use filesystems that don’t support accurate timestamps and permissions. Make sure you have ignore permissions enabled.

As for what’s the other device in the conflict. I don’t think there is a trivial way to work that out, you could query the rest api.

Thanks! I’ll try disabling this on the two PIs (it’s already disabled on android, it seems). Not sure it matters, but the Pi’s are running ext4 formatted external drives though (not FAT or something like that).

On a related note – is there a reason that the generated conflict files don’t record both devices that made changes/participated in the conflict? It seems like that could be an easy way to help the user understand conflicts better (naïvely, I’d prefer if the generated conflict showed both device IDs that participated in the conflict, rather than just one).

The assumption is that you know where the files were modified and you only need to know which of the files won.

In your case you have quite a few devices that misbehave hence this happens.

Thanks for your help, Audrius (and your work on Syncthing, I’ve been using it since 2015 :slight_smile: ).

I’ve put my thoughts into a feature request on Github, FWIW – Mark sync-conflict files with both devices participating in the conflict · Issue #7405 · syncthing/syncthing · GitHub

This only works in a single-user configuration though. We have a situation, where a few different people edit the same file on different computers in an office, so right now it is not easy to know what exactly has caused the conflict.

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