Hey all!
Thought I’d share a little experience I’ve had. This does need more investigation on my part, so don’t consider this as a big problem just yet. You do fantastic work!
I have an assistant that I’ve shared my work files with, but I have put exclusions on certain file types that they don’t need to access, or have the software to open in the first place.
It was going relatively well, but somehow they accidentally moved one folder into another folder. I’ve restored using versioning, and luckily it didn’t involve live files.
The only reason I noticed something was up, was because I glanced at the log, purely by coincidence
[WBJF4] 2022/11/29 14:57:44 INFO: Puller (folder "folder-name" (XXXXXX), item "Long directory"): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[WBJF4] 2022/11/29 14:57:44 INFO: Puller (folder "folder-name" (XXXXXX), item "Long directory"): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but contains ignored files (see ignore documentation for (?d) prefix)
[WBJF4] 2022/11/29 14:57:44 INFO: "folder name" (XXXXXX): Failed to sync 13 items
From this I could see clearly that it was them that accidentally moved the project folder into another project folder - partly because I wasn’t doing in file organising, but also because the folder that was moved, had no excluded file extensions in it.
They were quite surprised they made that mistake - however, after looking at things, it seems one issue that may have happened is the refreshing of the folder structure (in Windows 10). What also appears to happen is that the watch facility is too quick to notice changes…I’m sure it’s a real problem for the dev’s, as people do want quick sync’s. The problem comes when copying a ‘template folder’ as it causes multiple duplicates. To put this in a better way:
- I have a folder called “TEMPLATE PROJECT FOLDER”.
- They made a copy of this.
- Then renamed it correctly.
- ST saw the folder creation and immediately thought it was permanent.
- So afterwards there is a new project folder which is fine, but also a “TEMPLATE PROJECT FOLDER - Copy” folder. So instead of 1 new folder being created, there are 2.
My workaround for this is to ask them to right click the razor icon and “stop syncthing”. Make any big folder structure changes, then turn it back on.
While I’ve been the only user of ST, it’s worked flawlessly. Although I’ve had issues with adding a less ST knowledgeable user (and I’m not a ST pro!), I may have had the same issues if I used a more main stream file sync’ service.
Something I have noticed is that it’s sometimes necessary to ‘refresh’ the folder view, a bit like refreshing a webpage for changes (F5).
. It doesn’t happen always though, e.g. freshly after booting Explorer seems to refresh instantly. However, after some time has passed, it seems to slow down for some reason, sometimes not refreshing at all and requiring to use a manual method like F5 to refresh.