Nested folders

FAQ says “Do not nest shared folders.” OK, but does that mean I can’t share nested folders? My reason for considering Syncthing is to sync between my laptop and desktop computer, one of my picture folders (nested down 2 or 3 levels, ca. 60 Gig and growing). If that can’t be done, I’ll not be downloading this thing. Thanks

In Syncthing, you “Share” folders which you want to synchronize to other machines. The “Do not nest shared folders” means that you should not share a folder which is inside another shared folder. For example, if you have Pictures/Cats, you should not share both Pictures/Cats and Pictures.

Of course you can share folders which contain subfolders.

OK thanks! I though/hoped so, but the english of the FAQ is a bit ambiguous on that.

I wouldn’t say it’s ambiguous: it doesn’t talk about your case at all. It says “Don’t put one shared folder inside another shared folder”, and doesn’t talk about shared folders which contain other folders.

I’ll edit that doc anyway to clarify.

That would be good, methinks. All I see in the FAQ is this:

"2.2.12. Am I able to use nested Syncthing folders?

Do not nest shared folders. This behaviour is in no way supported, recommended or coded for in any way, and comes with many pitfalls."

Anyway, if you tweak it, I’m sure it will be better. Thanks.

Excuse me, bit sometimes using one shared folder inside another (shared folder) can be useful. Are there any plans to add this functionality to Syncthing?

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No.

The FAQ is a bit categorical, imho. It works fine to do that, as long as you avoid some pathological cases (folder A nested in folder B on device 1, the reverse on device 2) and are aware of the effects. The difficulty of fully documenting and testing this is, I guess, why it’s not supported.

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I see use case of nested folders: one folder shared with first computer and nested folder shared with second and never both folders shared with the same computer - because first folder is enough.

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Yeah, and you can do that, and it should work fine.

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I use nested folders a lot but have had ST crash if I enable fswatcher on a folder with nested folders.

Haven’t had time to debug/reproduce properly but I will try to have a look tomorrow.

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