Option to bypass versioning renamed folder?

[Pabby]

Is there an option to somehow bypass versioning an entire folder and all of its contents if that folder simply gets renamed?

Currently, if a folder within a shared folder is renamed (and versioning is enabled), it will put a duplicate of that folder with its old name and all of its contents into the .stversions folder. This can fill up your hard drive very fast if that folder contains terabytes of data.

I understand that this is a conscious choice, and the reasoning is that if a folder is renamed, and other users didn’t know it was renamed, they might assume it got deleted and would expect to find it in their .stversions folder. This philosophy assumes there’s no communication between users and it has some cons. First, their .stversions folder gets filled up with duplicate data. Second, in the scenario where users genuinely don’t communicate with each other, a user may believe that the folder was deleted by accident and bring it back into the share folder, causing a duplicate of data to now be synced to all other users.

I get that having this as the default option is the safest, but is there a way to override it? Perhaps any tricks with External Versioning that could accomplish this?

[tomasz86]

There are no such options in the default file versioning. You would probably need to either write your own script using external file versioning (see https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html#external-file-versioning) or simply set up a separate script that would run and clean up the .stversions folder of those files periodically.

[Pabby]

Okay, thanks! I’ll look into External File Versioning and see if I can throw something together.