More fine-grained Folder Master settings

Feature
#1

I don’t think this feature is currently available, and the Folder Master option doesn’t quite do what I want. At the moment I’m synchronising my music collection from my desktop to my laptop, but because the laptop has a significantly smaller hard drive I don’t want to sync absolutely everything.

If I don’t set the desktop to have a Folder Master option, any files I delete from the laptop will be deleted from the desktop as well. However, any new or changed files added to the laptop won’t get propagated back to the desktop, so there’s a number of use cases where I’d have to manually copy the files via a different channel:

  1. I add a new album or artist to the laptop collection while I’m out and about
  2. I change or update the tags on the laptop’s music
  3. I delete music on one of the devices: e.g. (a) decide to save space on the laptop by replacing less-frequently listened-to music with MP3s instead of FLAC, or (b) delete music on the laptop I no longer need.

Ideally what I’d like is for (1) and (2) to be synchronised, but (3) to not be. I think it might be possible to achieve what I want with lots of .stignore files and patterns, but an alternative way would be pretty cool.

1 Like
#2

There’s an advanced folder config option called ignoreDeletes that does what you need.

#3

What I think I’d have to do to achieve the result I’m after is set ignoreDeletes at both ends, but the documentation advises that this can result in confusing behaviour.

If both Desktop and Laptop have ignoreDeletes set, and I add a new file to Laptop, it’ll end up being sent to Desktop. However, if I then delete that file on Desktop, what will happen? Will the file get sent again or not? Will it get deleted from Laptop? How will the status of both devices show? I imagine they’ll end up very rapidly becoming permanently out-of-sync.

Massively out-of-sync directories
#4

“Ignore deletes” means that when another device announces that a file has been deleted, we just pretend we didn’t hear that. We think we are in sync, but the other side sees us as out of sync. If we change the “deleted” file it becomes a new version and gets synced back to the other devices.

Actually, that’s exactly what the docs say, so maybe I misunderstood your scenario.

As for the confusing part of doing it on both sides… Assume two devices share a folder, containing two files A and B. One device deletes A, the other deletes B. Neither delete is replicated on the other side. The folders are now 100% different, yet supposedly in sync.