First of all, thanks for all the work done. I am yet another person that came here from btsync. I have been waiting on btsync that they would introduce selective sync, and was very upset by the way they changed the program once they did.
One of the problems I am finding is that I wish to keep all my material in one computer, and only download on my laptop the folders for the active projects I am working on. This works fine as I start a new project, I open a folder and that gets syncronized. So now I have two copies of it, one on the laptop and one on the HD of the home computer. Then once I finish working with that project I add it to the .stignore file, and it remains only there. If I need it back, I delete it from the .stignore file and I get it back. Perfect.
The problem comes once I have several hundreds of those projects, and in particular all the projects from the past. They are organised by year. So I have 2003/projects/PROJECT1/ 2003/projects/PROJECT2/ … now, nothing of 2003 should be on my computer as it is 12 years old. And so for the other years. Now suppose that I need to recover some projects from a past year. I don’t remember the exact name of the project, only that it was in 2014. In the current system I cannot go and find the name of the past projects. I would need to download all the 2014/projects/ directory.
So the problem is: how can I have on computer A an index of the directories on computer B, so I can change on computer A the .stignore file to download a specific folder? Obviously A and B are in different places (potentially different countries) so directly checking it is not easy.
I am sure this is quite a common problem. So it must have raised before. This is, for example, obviously linked to the Selective Sync Feature request: Selective Sync? .
Given this problem, I would like to suggest a possible solution: a folder could be defined as downloadable as “ghost” (or empty shell). When you download a folder as “ghost” it would download all the files in it, and the subfolders, but not the content of the subfolders. To indicate that a folder should be downloaded as ghost it could be added the symbol & before it,
So I could write: 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 &2013 &2013/Projects !2013/Projects/Project5 2014 //2015
In this way I would download the material from 2015, and the files and the subfolders inside 2013, and the files and the subfolders inside 2013/Projects. By looking at those subfolders I could decide which I want to add. For now I would be downloading Project5 from 2013 in full.
This system would also have the added benefit to permit the user to very easily send things to the other computer and delete them from here. If I want to store something and get rid of it here rapidly I just need to add it to one of the ghost subfolders. The file would then be saved in the home computer. And then deleted from here once that is done.
Thanks for reading it, please let me know what you think about it. Pietro
LATE EDIT: due to another discussion I now realise that adding something to the ignore list does not delete it in the computer. Thus the ignore list cannot work as a selective sync. Thus the whole suggestion is now still possible but less useful.