Power failure last night. One laptop suspended itself as time went on, the other stayed up, but both lost internet access until this morning.
The one which suspended itself controls a Maildirs hierarchy, and archived old mail half an hour before suspending itself. The other laptop was confused for an hour or two and would not sync everything in the Maildirs; had a lot of messages that “Maildirs/junk/cur/…: no connected device has the required version of this file”, and “Failed to sync 25 times” and ““Default Folder” isn’t making sync progress - retrying in {1,2,4,8}m.000012s”. Other files synced promptly. I rebooted both. I shut down and restarted Syncthing on both several times. Both are 1.34. Each’s web GUI showed the other as Disconnected.
An Android phone also runs Syncthing, but its .stignore ignores the Maildirs.
And just now, as I was typing this, it did sync! I edited all the verbs to past tense, and I guess my question now is, why does this happen, and what can I do to ease its pain and confusion next time?
I don’t see any obvious recovery messages from the laggard. I have no idea what happened.
I thought of manually updating the relevant Maildirs, but there were differences both ways and I would be more likely to lose info than correct it.
It’s pretty obvious, one of the devices advertised the files and then went offline, so we have nowhere to get the files from. It will stay in this state until the device that advertises comes back online and provides us the files or tells is that they are deleted.
Yes, that did seem like the problem. But both devices were online and were syncing other files, for at least 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Is this delay normal, should it be quicker, and is there anything I can do to quicken it?
Files are handled in serial (more or less) not parallel (within a folder), so if other files are syncing, then it’s just a matter of getting to those files that were previously missing.
All files were syncing except some which it kept claiming no longer existed. Those are the leftovers. It kept doubling the retry interval. I restarted Syncthing, I rebooted both computers, tried several things. Everything else was synced. Is there anything I could have done to speed up syncing those files?