Handling Ignored Then Deleted Files

[Moisie]

Hello:

I’ve got a large folder that synced between quite a few users, and some of them have been running out of disk space to host that folder.

Consequently we added some subfolders to the Ignore Patterns for items which weren’t needed by these users, then deleted the subfolders from their systems.

This has generally worked well - but is now producing an error on other systems which do sync these folders:

directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally

So the diagnosis is entirely correct - but it leaves this ‘master’ copy of the folder in an Out of Sync state.

If a subfolder is ignored, then deleted - then surely the deletion should be ignored too - thus not causing an error on other systems?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

It sounds like files in the directory were ignored, but not the directory itself? You can delete the files somewhere they are not ignored.

[Moisie]

Ah - interesting - thanks Jakob.

Presumably that would have been caused by a trailing slash on the end of the Ignore Pattern?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

I don’t think the slash itself matters (though I could be wrong), but somedir/* would be what I’m thinking of.

[imsodin (Simon)]

I think a trailing slash does matter: Paths we use internally never have a trailing slash. Thus if you have foo/ as a pattern, that then gets expanded to foo/** as a glob pattern, which doesn’t match foo but everything within it. As opposed to adding foo which is expanded to both foo and foo/**, matching both the dir and it’s content.

[Moisie]

Thanks both - I shall double-check my Ignores and correct as appropriate!