Disable generation of sync-conflict files?

Support
1

I’m syncing some large (PST) files between two devices and experiencing a lot of conflicts. I don’t understand why, as one device is set to folder master, and the other device never changes any the files.

Is it possible to simply stop Syncthing from leaving sync-conflict files all over the place? I really can’t imagine ever needing them in my situation.

What’s worse, although I can set up a cron job to periodically erase all files matching sync-conflict, I’m also on ZFS and doing periodic snapshots, so the sync-conflict files eat up several terabytes of storage over a couple of weeks even if they’re deleted. (Unless maybe if I run the cron job every minute or so, but that’s a lot of disk I/O for a very inelegant solution.)

2

Yes, set maxConflicts to zero for the folder, in advanced config.

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3

If it isn’t getting changed it wouldn’t be conflicting.

If a program is using the PST it will likely make changes to it, they are not just flat files but containers of items. Syncthing is not designed to synchronise these when in use by two machines at once, that would require purpose built software, and this could lead to data loss.

One being master should prevent anything major happening so…

In the advanced settings for each folder you can change the number of conflicts to keep. The default -1 is unlimited, I assume 0 would be none.

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4

But I’m absolutely positive that only one of the machines (the master) is modifying anything. The other is basically a backup server. It only receives files and stores them.

It could be that the slave sometimes only receives part of a file before new changes occur at the master, as these are large files that take a while to sync. Would that lead to a conflict?

5

Thank you, this works. Yay.

6

The files are stored as temp files while they are being transferred. They will not be made conflicts unless the download completes so that should not cause this.

It could be a permissions issue, file permissions not being able to be set or another process changing the mtime somehow.

7

To add a datapoint, I also see this a lot. I have a raspberry pi, which just acts as a headless backup server, but I still regularly see sync conflicts on files.

8

It’s impossible for partial files to cause conflicts. I suggest you diff the files and you will be proven that they are actually different.

Another thing could be some sort of media indexer which you don’t expect updating some metadata of the files.

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