I’m new so Syncthing, and I’m trying to understand what the purpose of the “pause device” button is. I’ve found this forum post, but it doesn’t seem to actually touch on what the feature does. I also cannot find information about it in the docs.
My understanding is that this feature pre-dates the folder pause feature.
My understanding of the folder pause feature is to pause pushes/pulls between the global state and the local state. Please correct me if this is incorrect.
My assumption of the device pause is that it prevents communication between the local and remote device. However, does this mean that if they were connected to a mutual third device, changes would still propagate? What use is pausing a single device? Is pausing all devices effectively the same as pausing the folder?
It’s a bit more than just that, even though this is obviously the result. But as far as I know it also stops watching for changes locally if this was enabled, it stops the periodic scans, and so forth. Practically all the folder-specific related activity, locally, stops till you unpause it.
So in this case any local change will not be detected until you unpause the folder and let the scanning do its work again.
If those three devices share the same folder(s), yes.
I’m sure many users have many different reasons to use this feature. I tend to pause one device when I know that that device runs on a metered connection. But the configuration possibilities are virtually endless, so the reason to use this feature can vary wildly.
Nothing will be synced when all remote devices are paused, from that point of view it’s similar. But the local folders still run their watchers, scans, etc. So Syncthing would still know about local changes, it just doesn’t try to sync those changes with the remote devices till they’re back in an ‘unpaused’ state.