I have seeded 3 folders (199gbm 145gb and 549gb) using rsync (preserving the time stamps). I saw the post Questions about hash database preseeding and file versioning, but I cannot get the described results. On the computer I seeded I created a share, shared it with a dummy client, allowed it to index. After both the original and the seeded systems indexed everything, I then share the folder with the original and the seeded system. Even though the the time stamps are identical it tells me that it must sync all the data again.
What am I doing wrong? What can I change to make this work?
So I just let it run and wait? Is there something I can look for in the Logs to show me that is happening? What about adding something in the GUI that states it is validating the files rather then syncing them.
Right now it is sitting at Syncing 0%, but I will monitor it to see if the number of files to sync go down.
The syncing in Syncthing is based on “version vectors”. Essentially, these describe the history of a file so we can figure out if one copy is a descendant of another.
After seeding two devices, each device has a copy of each file with a history that says “discovered on this device”. Two copies of foo.txt where one is “discovered on device A” and the other is “discovered on device B” are different and need to be synced. Hence it indicates that the data needs to be synced.
However, when actually doing so it’ll notice that the contents are the same and just tag the two as being of the same version. This should be a matter of minutes, at most.
You should have a look at the Download and Upload numbers on the right. They should not really change while “syncing” (after the initial index exchange).
I did have to do a few more things to get it to sync. I was getting sync failures so I have to recursively chown the folders and files of the seeded computer (it was still set to root).
As I said right now my computer is currently having its CPU abused (there is an rsync going on for another folder).
I get very poor speed on the local LAN, about 6-8 MiB/s. I did increase the pullers to 32, but I am sure it has more to do with the CPU on the seeded computer (actually a Synology NAS, Atom CPUs are nice but not for hashing files). I did remove any LAN limit and post securely in the advanced options (I’ll change it back after the sync), but that seems to have made no difference.