Out-of-sync errors from the past

[adiabatic]

I’ve got several computers and an iPad syncing most things successfully. However, I’m going through some out-of-sync items between my new MacBook (purchased two years ago) and my Windows machine, and my usual tricks aren’t helping.

My Windows machine says that a bunch of files — mostly .DS_Store files and Thumbs.db files — are out of date. The weird part: All of these files’ modification times are from before this laptop even existed. Furthermore, the modifying device, for most of these files, has a device name that I don’t recognize. It can’t even be my old laptop, since it’s a 2015 model and these modification times range from 2011 to 2018.

My iMac is a 2017 model, and somehow there’s a .DS_Store file that was modified in 2016 by my iMac.

Normally I’d just run

find . -name .DS_Store -delete

on all my Macs and also run the Windows equivalent on the Windows machine, but I’ve done that on all my devices and that hasn’t cleared the reported sync error on the Windows machine. The .DS_Store files are all gone, yet this error remains.

Suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[adiabatic]

I think I’ve solved it.

On all my Macs, I have a .stignore-shared with the following contents:

(?d).DS_Store
(?d)Thumbs.db
_gen

and an .stignore that looks like this:

#include .stignore-shared

…but not on my Windows machine, at least until a minute ago.

Now everything’s cleared up.