I’d like a way for Syncthing to signal more clearly that there have been sync conflicts. It’s happened to me a couple of times now that I’ve ended up with 4 or 5 versions of the same file in sync conflict. So far it hasn’t caused me any real problems, so it’s not a big problem, but I would like to keep my folders clean. Even just a UI notification that says “sync conflicts in folder” or something the same way that it says “out of date” now would be great. Bonus points if it would tell me which ones they are!
I’ve done my best to look around for something like this, but haven’t found any options or topics on it. Feel free to just redirect me if I’ve missed something! Thanks everyone
The recommended wrapper application for Windows, “SyncTrayzor”, has such a functionality built in. I think there someone once posted some script to detect (and resolve?) conflicts here on the forum - a search might bring them up.
There’s nothing fundamental stopping anyone from adding such functionality to the web UI or creating a small companion application that provides that functionality - all the pieces to get there should be available. It’s just that noone has done so.
Conflict resolution is - in general - up to the file owner and cannot be done automatically by any kind of a tool.
But conflict notification can be an important issue, since it deals with loss of information, if omitted.
If the file owner gets informed of an conflict very late, resolution becomes more and more difficult even for the owner. So an immediate (email)-notification would be helpful here.
I agree with this. While conflict resolution is up to the user or software defining the file format, conflict file creation apparently is up to the sync software. Therefore, I would expect it to notify the user whenever it creates such files, so that one can actually take action. Another perspective is that it moves user-created information to a non-user-created location, but currently it expects the user to know somehow.
Without any notification, conflicts will likely be overseen, which may result in data loss or unnecessary complex conflict resoltion (imagine files are already edited again before resolving the conflict).
One could discuss though whether this is the sync software’s responsibility or whether separate software should take care of monitoring and notifying about conflicts files. Personally, I would love to see the sync software doing it as it would make things much simpler from a user perspective.
The dashboard would be a good place imo as it already displays per-folder info.
My suggestion for a workaround is a cron job or local analog to script looking for any “.sync-conflict” files. Exit with whatever kind of notification you need if it finds one.