Syncing User\Username folder

General
1

Is anyone syncing their entire user folder across OS’s? I was thinking about syncing my entire user folder from windows to macOS. Is this just too much?

2

For the whole folder, I’d say yes, that’s too much, even between the same operating systems. There are too many files in there that are applicable to the specific OS installation only, so you will need to utilise ignore patterns with exclusions heavily to pick only what should be synced.

While you can use ignore patterns to do something like

!/Documents
!/Music
!/Videos
/

and sync only specific folders, for the sake of simplicity and efficiency I’d personally suggest to just add them to Syncthing one by one and sync separately (as long as the total number of such folders is reasonable, e.g. no more than 10).

2 Likes
3

100% agreed — it’s easier to manage the configuration, easier to troubleshoot, and easier to see specific stats.

4

I agree that there is a lot of junk in the user folder that is useless to sync. Having said that, however, I routinely sync datafile folders which are much larger in size than my user folder, without any problem.

5

The size is usually not an issue here :slight_smile:. It’s just that if you’ve got a folder with a complex structure and you want to sync maybe up to 5 subfolders out of it, then it is likely more efficient to just sync only those subfolders separately.

Another problem is that in this specific case with Windows and macOS, there may be some differences in folder names, e.g. Movies vs Videos, so you cannot just use ignore patterns to sync or merge those. However, you can do that if you add the two to Syncthing as a separate folder.

6

Yeah, this doesn’t seem like best practice as also specified by the documentation…

Syncing Configuration Files

Syncing configuration files between devices (such that multiple devices are using the same configuration files) can cause issues. This is easy to do accidentally if you sync your home folder between devices. A common symptom of syncing configuration files is two devices ending up with the same Device ID…

7

I am doing this for the purpose of synching my savegames across different machines. it does work if you have a carefully curated ignorelist so that folders that would create issues are not synched across devices.