Please forgive me if the question has already been answered, but I have searched here and there, and could not find any definite information.
For example, I have a folder of 110 GB and 160,000 files. I add it to Syncthing on a new device, but set .stignore to ignore everything except for top level files (i.e. /*/). Once everything has been processed, the index folder on the new device takes around 400 MB, despite there being nothing synced but a list of empty folders.
Is this normal? If yes, then can anything be done about it? It is necessary to include information about ignored files in the index?
I am asking because this has just caused a low end Android device run out of space, which was a surprise for me, as almost no files were actually physically synced there. Yet, the index folder took almost half of the 1 GB system partition, which in the end crashed the application (and made the whole system barely usable).
This is indeed expected. It’s required for “completion bookkeeping”: The client ignoring stuff needs to tell others that it ignores it, otherwise they will consider you out-of-sync indefinitely as you are missing the ignored files.
For your particular use-case, where you sync just a subset to a limited device, an option might be creating a separate shared folder containing that subset and sharing just that.
Yes, I was thinking about that, but the problem is that I have been doing something like
!/folder1
!/folder2
/*/
with the actual included folders being different depending on the device. This would require a lot of separate shared folders for each specific device, which I wanted to avoid by using .stignore.
On the other hand, I have also observed Synthing using a lot of battery due to a constant stream of remote updates, even if the actual files end up being ignored, so I may need to cook something up on the sending side anyway.
It would be cool if it was possible to share the same folder multiple times with different ignore lists, but this is not possible, unfortunately .
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