Is scanning enough without being able to watch files?

I’m trying to use a storage VPS service as backup, which limits the max inotify file watches to the default 8192 files. They don’t allow changing it. However, I think I’ve got something over 500k files I want to sync. Will Syncthing work alright without being able to watch files? Looking over the docs, it seems like scanning will be sufficient, if somewhat slow, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I’m fine if it’s somewhat slow to pick up changes, since it’s going to be relatively rare for me to modify files directly on the VPS anyway.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/syncing.html#scanning

Yep, it’ll be fine without watches.

Great, thanks!

Just for completions sake: Inotify watches are per dir, not file.

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. Dropbox wanted me to bump the limit to 100k, but it says I’ve got over 500k files, so I was a little confused by that. Still, I’ve got quite a lot of folders, too, being that I sync all of my git repos as well.

Generally speaking, do not do this. Especially not bidirectionally. It doesn’t work.

Can you tell me more as to why this is problematic? I’ve been doing this in my Dropbox for years and it hasn’t been a problem. I’m generally not doing anything bi-directional. It’s more so that if something happens to my computer, I’ll have an up to date backup and I can quickly get back to a working state.

That’s fine. Bidirectional is not, because git repos have internal structure beyond just being files which Syncthing doesn’t understand or respect.

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