I have been testing out Syncthing for a couple of weeks because I have become fed up with Dropbox. And now that f*** Dropbox has deleted a lot of files from my laptop as an indirect effect of removing symlink support (Linux) which brings me to my question.
I have a three-node setup with my desktop pc as my main computer, my laptop for out-of-home-office use and finally my NAS as a receive only backup destination.
Syncthing was running on my laptop when Dropbox deleted the files and these deletions were replicated on my NAS.
My desktop PC was not running, so everything is fine there. But if I start Syncthing on it, the changes from the other computers will propagate and the files will get deleted here also.
Can I somehow change the sync direction so I mark my desktop pc as the “good state” of my file so the other nodes will mirror that state?
Yes, set the folder to “send only” on the PC. When they connect the PC will consider itself out of sync but not apply any of the changes, because send-only. It will show an “override” button. Press it and the other devices will adopt whatever is the current state on the PC. This includes undoing any changes the PC hasn’t seen, so if you’ve done other changes as well in addition to the dropbox mishap, take care of those separately.
Oh and maybe start Syncthing without your network connected, or from the command line with --paused, to avoid it receiving and applying any changes before you reconfigure.
