Separate send/receive .stignore patterns or files?

Feature
1

I backup the photos/videos from my phone, laptop, and other devices onto a home server using Syncthing, but wanting to configure them so that they’ll send all files to the server while ignoring files/folder matching certain patterns

That way if I download a picture and store it in Folder A, it will be synced to my home server but won’t be sent back to the Phone if it’s changed or deleted from the phone

I’ve got quite a large gallery of pictures and videos that take a large amount of space, but currently the .stignore file prevents processing any files that match the patterns in it and setting the phone or home server to send/receive only would prevent syncing other files/folders

Maybe we could add some extra pattern markers as prefixes in .stignore? Like adding a (?r) for only matching when receiving and (?s) for only matching when sending

so that something like this (?r)**/.tmp* would only ignore any .tmp* file/folder when receiving, but would ignore that pattern when sending files (always send it, but ignore receiving it)

or something in my use case > (?r)(?i)**/Patreon/ would always send the contents of the (case-insensitive) Patreon folder, but never receive any (?r)(?i)(?d)**/Patreon/ would do the same as before, but still remove files that are removed upstream. This way if you sync a file from your phone but delete it elsewhere and that is propagated out, it would still be removed on the phone

It would be great to setup a Selective Syncing system Another option would be to have optional secondary ignore files like .stsend and .streceive that are specific to sending or receiving specifically.

If someone knows an existing method of doing this without splitting a single synchronized folder into many, it would be great to know how to set it up

2

There are longer architectural explanations to be made, but tl;dr it doesn’t make sense in Syncthing to have separate ignore patterns per direction. You’d break all kinds of assumptions about the world that Syncthing depends on.

3

Further, Syncthing is not a backup tool in itself, but (as the name strongly suggests) a synchronization tool. So I recommend that you:

  1. Keep synchronising between phone (and other devices) and home server …
  2. … and use a dedicated backup tool like e.g. Restic on the home server to back it up to some suitable medium or another server or cloud storage.

(If you have a machine where you NEVER edit anything, you could use Syncthing as a “poor man’s backup” by enabling versioning on that machine.)

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