I want to be able to sync my Thunderbird email, but found that Syncthing was tripping over the open databases and creating many temp files.
Is it possible for Syncthing not to sync while a file is in use, and then only sync when I have shut down Thunderbird? or use some sort of shadow copy? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy )
My ISP web mail is quite restrictive in storage - so it gets purged every 45 days, and I don’t want to use gmail or other web mail providers if possible, because the search functions in Thunderbird are fast and awesome.
I use ST to sync my Thunderbird profile across three laptops. But… I always close one instance of TB and allow time for syncing before opening another machine’s instance of TB. This has been successful for about three years without creating conflicting files. This works remotely as well as on my LAN.
I use a Raspberry PI3 as a ‘constant-on’ device between laptops. Works great, just leave time for the TB databases to sync. My TB profile is about 1.6GB.
(BTW, the RPI3 uses a cron job and Borgbackup each day to sync my profile to rsync.net.)
That sounds great Russell At least i’m not the only person to think of this
I use a Windows 10 PC as my “constant on” remote device between 12pm and 6 am to simulate a private cloud service. A reboot every morning just keeps the system fresh and ST loads on start up as a service. But a Raspberry PI3 sound much more energy efficient to simulate a cloud service - I like that
Q. Do you have syncing paused while you use TB your local device, and then resume after you close TB? Or is it syncing all the time? I find that unless I pause while using TB, I get tmp files on the remote device - especially when ST disconnects/reconnects due to TCP drop outs. ( I see this happening in real time on the remote device through an RDP connection )
I did notice though that it appears that sometimes ST sorts itself out and deletes the tmp files on the remote device - I just don’t understand why the tmp files are created if there is risk of losing recent emails.
@Paul No, ST is not paused. The numbers of files in my TB profile increases by 7-8 when TB is running then reverts on both sides when TB is quit. Rescan time on the TB folder is 60 secs, so I wait at least for the rescan before powering off my laptop.
As you mentioned Russel, being aware of sync timing and status is important, especially for power on/power off.
I think the tmp files happen when the email database is changed while ST is updating. Normally this would not be a problem, except I was really uber over testing to see if I could break ST. Every few seconds I would send a test email and check for new ones. As a result ST was half way through a sync, and could not find it’s source anymore - so it created a temp file in the destination PC. After normal usage ( which is sending and checking every few minutes at most ) all the tmp files cleared up and ST/TB is now working together perfectly. Now that I understand this, I can easily avoid it.
I can recommend ST with Thunderbird email - just dont spam your own system
- just dont spam your own system 