I have two questions related to a recent near catastrophe at our office. First, the story of the catastrophe.
Most of the office’s working files are on a Linux server under the directory “Files”. That file contains sub-folders that are synced with Syncthing to home computers. Those synced sub-folders are approximately 120,000 items, totaling about 500 GB.
Someone, let us hope accidentally, moved “Files” into another folder.
That move,as you can imagine, caused havoc not only in the office (“Where did all the files go?”) but the move had repercussions all along the Syncthing chain.
Moving the “Files” folder back where it belonged took only seconds once we found out what happened to it. Diagnosing the problem took about an hour. During the hour I had started a restore of the Files from a backup disk, and you can probably imagine the hours that was going to take.
Unfortunately, the syncing process had begun on the home computers when “Files” was moved, then the files from the disk backup came into play, then an hour later the home computers saw “Files” back from where it had been moved and started doing what ever Syncthing saw as appropriate when faced with that mess.
And what a mess. The home computers started changing the files on the Linux server. I don’t even know what all happened but I do know that files disappeared from the “Files” folder that had been moved back (I guess because they were missing on the home computers?).
Once the office workers saw files on the “Files” folder that was moved back into place I thought to turn off Syncthing on the Linux server. Whew, that stopped the flood of deletions and I was able to use the 10 minute scheduled server backups to recover the missing files.
So now Syncthing is turned off at the server, and the home workers have to directly use mapped drives to the office server, which is tedious when working with 100MB pdf files. But they are toughing it out.
I have two questions:
What should I have done when the “Files” directory was found to have been moved?
What should I do now to get the home computers in sync with the office server?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Great product. John in Oregon.