We have three servers set up to sync files. Users access mostly Excel files. One user is complaining that Excel is no longer warning him when someone on another server has the file open. Supposedly, Excel would warn it is open by another user and open in ‘Read Only’ mode.
I didn’t think Syncthing did this but he seems to think so.
Does syncthing support this? If not, does Syncthing have something similar so users don’t inadvertently overwrite each others data when working on the same file?
Syncthing doesn’t do anything like this by itself. It’s possible it may have synced a lock file that indicates to excel that the file was open, and that this somehow had some desirable effect for once.
Makes sense. Disregarding that, do the newer versions of syncthing have a way to handle this kind of issue or is still “newest save wins”?
I think it creates conflict files instead of overwriting the file…
If you are on windows, and often have issues with conflicts, you can consider using SyncTrayzor (a wrapper for syncthing on windows), as it has a nice GUI for reslving conflicts.
This works when the file times differ a lot. I saw a conflict on a month old file for example. But when the files are edited at the same time no conflict file is created.
Conflict file fill be created only if the system can’t decide “which file is up to date”:
For example - if we have 2 nodes, in sync. Now, when they are disconnected, file F is edited both on node A and on node B. Then nodes come back online. The file was modified on both ends, syncthing can not perform any “merge”, so it’ll just create a conflict file.
If, however, both nodes are constantly online, the chances of it happening are small. Most likely the change will propogate fast enough to other node that by the time it’ll save something to it, it’ll be saving it to already updated file. So most of the time the sort of “conflict resolution” will be for locall applications to deal with.
Notice, btw, that in the last scenario, if local software (e.g. Excel) won’t recognize that the file was changed on disk, and you’ll just save - it’ll overwrite any changes made to the file remotely.
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