My old phone tried to swim so is currently unavailable. I install syncthing-fork on my new phone. Different ID (of course), similar config but slightly different. After a few days, syncthing on my new phone asks if I want to overwrite a folder that was only synced with my old phone… when trying to understand why, I realise that my new phone appears as my old phone on my other syncthing devices. Sure enough, I check my new phone and it has the old phone’s ID, with the old phone’s config
how is that possible?
could google/android have tried to be smart and get me the same config? (same google account) both where installed with f-droid
both are Redmi phones, but I didn’t connect to the MI account/cloud so it would be very strange
I didn’t sync my syncthing config
It’s not a big issue for me, I’ll fix it, but it is a very confusing and could be very problematic in some cases
I would also think that when reading what happened. Was the Google One / Backup to Google Drive feature enabled on your phone that died? Syncthing itself does not store your device ID (technically spoken private key stuff) anywhere outside of your phone.
I’ve never got to the point to test this scenario as I’m not using Google Drive backup at all.
Yes, that’s my best guess too. But I’m confused, it would be litterally the only app google was able to restore, everything else I had to reconfigure myself
Also why only after 5 days
Could there be a way for syncthing to detect that and at least notify the user?
If we would know more about the mechanism behind that google restore, we could handle that.
Do they ask you as the user if you want to restore explicitly? Could you select which phone backup to restore from gdrive in the process? I assume, a user can backup multiple devices to their service.
Just an idea for first aid here: we could exempt the crt/pem files from gdrive backup and then Syncthing should generate a new device ID because those files are regenerated. Question is, how do we get rid of the “old” device ID then which is still present in config.xml and shows a device entry in the UI?
I guess there might also be another problem: if it was installed by fdroid, “google restore” might not have had the app installer package (apk) available until you manually grabbed it?!
Reasons, decision and change PR:
Thank you for your feedback on this . I’ve also re-read past GitHub issues on the matter and came to the conclusion that the (recently) improved export/import feature will suffice and integrates better with the Syncthing ecosystem (user’s don’t need gdrive if they can sync the config in an encrypted archive).