Reformatting - best practices to restore?

[Roflcopter]

Hi gang, Long time user - wanted to thanks the community for this amazing software.

I’m planning to do a housekeeping reformat and Windows update (Win 7 to 10) on my main workstation. Any best practices or guides to keep Syncthing working smoothly through the reformat-reinstall procedure?

Many thanks, Al

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

You have roughly three options;

• Copy and restore everything – all data, and all Syncthing config and database.
• Copy and restore just the Syncthing config & certificates but not data or database – it’ll redownload the synced folders.
• Restore nothing, setting Syncthing up again from scratch.

[Roflcopter]

Amazing, thankss @calmh!

I forgot to mention - I’m only reformatting the system drive (SDD), and have my files on a normal HDD. So if I leave the files untouched, I should simply be able to copy and then drag and drop the config files (*.perm and config.xml) into the new syncthing install folder?

Thx again.

[tomasz86]

If the folder paths and the files themselves are going to remain exactly the same, then you could also just back up the whole Syncthing “home” folder, including the database and such. Then, after reinstalling Windows, you can place it in the original location and run Syncthing the same way as you are doing now.

Of course, it is advisable to have proper backups just in case, and you may want to set everything to Receive Only and/or pause all folders and devices before doing the migration too. Also, all the copying should obviously be done after shutting Syncthing down completely first.

For the record, this is exactly the same as the first method suggested by @calmh above (with some extra precautions). It will be much faster than anything else, especially if you have tonnes of data.

[Roflcopter]

Thank you @tomasz86 ! This sounds like the easiest implementation - I’ll let you guys know how it goes.