first I want to thank everyone for Syncthing, this is great software! Thank you!
What I describe happens on my Linux only systems. They all run the same version of Syncthing (1.19.2~ds1-1) and Debian Linux (12) in a mix of ARM and X86 deployments.
My question is if someone could provide me with a hint on how to improve the current setup so I do no longer get these conflicts on a regular basis. I guess I am missing something but I don’t know what it is…
To avoid a misunderstanding: I do not share my entire home directory but only a couple of special dot files/directories which are symlinked to a specific sync folder. The Syncthing database is not synced, of course.
My ARM based server (A) shares mostly receive only folders. I have multiple clients but usually only one of them runs at a time. Sync conflicts occur most frequent with Firefox while it is running. I sync the Firefox directory so my browsing session moves with me when I changes clients. This is a receive only folder on the server and send/receive folder on all clients.
What I do not understand is how a conflict can occur with only 2 devices being online where one device (the server) can only receive changes. There is no third device that could cause a conflict but they occur…
Most of the time some sqlite files are part of the conflict and I found this article in the forum describing the underlying problem I guess. However, the proposed solution does not work for me since these sqlite files seem to be managed by Firefox. Other files involved with Firefox conflicts are *.jsonlz4, *.txt and *.bin files. From time to time I also notice the mc.ini file from Midnight Commander creates a conflict, too. So it looks like this is not only related to sqlite files.
Any idea on how I can avoid these conflicts to happen? Is there something in the change detection configuration like “fsWatcherDelayS” I should configure?
The only workflow where this would work, using any sync tool, is for you to exit Firefox on machine A and let the files sync to B, before starting Firefox on B. Then the opposite in the other direction. As soon as you have Firefox running in more than one place at the same time you will get conflicts. (And maybe also corrupt your Firefox profile entirely.)
Thank you for your reply! I wasn’t clear in describing that Firefox always runs only on one system at a time. So this should be no issue I assume. Any other idea what I miss here?
Are you sure that all changes have finished syncing before you start the applications on the other device? By default, Syncthing has a 10 second delay for new files / modifications and 60 second delay for deletions when it comes to detecting (and pushing) local changes to remote devices.
Yes I can see everything is in sync before I launch Firefox. Only one client is online at a time since I can work only on one computer at a time. So the only other device online is the server which is configured as receive-only for this folder. The server is headless and no Firefox runs on the server. So I do not understand where these conflicts can come from since there is no other device online that is using the folder in a send + receive configuration. Only the client I currently use is online and syncs to a receive only server. How can this create a conflict?
I should mention that I can run Firefox sometimes for a full day without causing a sync conflict. On other days like today, I get them after a couple of hours of use…
For completeness: there is a smartphone with syncthing-fork running but this folder is not shared with the smartphone at all so I assume it plays no role here.
for the sake of simplicity I compared one of the text files that is causing a sync conflict. Here is what I did:
> user@hp-dt:~$ ls -al /home/user/.sync_data/home/.mozilla/firefox/j48589zw.default-esr/serviceworker.sync-conflict-20250211-232504-DeviceID.txt /home/user/.sync_data/home/.mozilla/firefox/j48589zw.default-esr/serviceworker.txt
> -rwx------ 1 user user 185 11. Feb 00:25 /home/user/.sync_data/home/.mozilla/firefox/j48589zw.default-esr/serviceworker.sync-conflict-20250211-232504-DeviceID.txt
> -rwx------ 1 user user 185 12. Feb 09:14 /home/user/.sync_data/home/.mozilla/firefox/j48589zw.default-esr/serviceworker.txt
I must add: the timestamp of “00:25” means I was working on one of my notebooks which is a bit slow compared to my desktop computer. The conflict arising at timestamp “09:14” is caused when I started Firefox on my main desktop computer. A quite powerful machine… Does that makes sense or is there anything else I can provide to put more light on this?
I did some tests over the last days. Usually, I wait 1 minute before shutting down a client to let everything settle. In my test, I’ve added another minute so I wait 2 minutes now before I shutdown a client. No sync errors occour anymore as long as I wait 2 minutes before shutdown… This indicates to me that what I described is not a syncthing issue but probably caused by one of my clients just being too slow to do the job in time… I update this thread just in case anyone else runs into this… However, many thanks to everyone who responded!