Reverting to uncloned Windows 10

I’ve been dual-booting Debian 8 and Windows 10. As I’ve acquired a big SSHD, I decided to clone my Windows installation with VMware standalone converter and run in a VMware VM under Debian using virtual disks.

The idea was to avoid too much re-booting at the expense of Windows running more slowly. This trade-off would become less expensive as I come to use Debian more and Windows less.

The virtual and the native Windows both run syncthing (and SyncTrayzor) use the same certificate and, I would expect, look the same to other nodes.

I’ve also synced much of my data from the VM to Debian. Thus I have data triplicated on the one drive.

I’m not booting the native Windows these days, so it merely serves as a point in time backup.

But let’s suppose I give up on the VM and go back to dual-booting. Is there anything I need to consider from the syncthing point of view before booting Windows natively? Will it just sync the backlog from the Raspberry Pi and carry on as normal?

Is there any reason I can’t switch between native and vm at will?

Currently this should not be a problem because the full index is sent when connecting.

Not sure what will happen when https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/2020 is done, it should be handled in some nice way (retransfer whole index) because reverting an old backup will look similar for syncthing on other devices.

Thanks for the reassurance @Alex. Looking at http://docs.syncthing.net/draft/localver.html makes me think that reverting to an old version will be catered for.

Well I did eventually try it.

On Windows, I have syncthing start 10 minutes after logon and google drive after another 10.

I scanned quite a few photos under the guest before I booted native Win 10. These ended up in a folder common to st and gd.

I ended up with about 10 conflicts.

It seems that minutes wasn’t long enough for st to catch up with the backlog before gd poke its nose in.

However, thanks to @canton7 and using the conflict resolution feature of SyncTrayzor, all was cleared up in a trice.

Conflict resolution is the killer reason to use this front-end.

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