Want to sync Android WhatsApp with Syncthing but not sure what to ignore? Here’s the list of Ignore Patterns for Seamless Syncing.
This post is for future users. If you have any suggestions regarding this topic, please feel free to contribute.
I do use WhatsApp but I don’t sync anything related to it (as I don’t really care if the conversation content is lost). However, out of curiosity, would it be safe to just do
*.
.*
instead of listing all the specific files? Are there any important files/folders that start with .?
Hi tomasz86,
I think I might be doing it wrong. Your solution of putting *. and .* in the ignore list seems ideal for WhatsApp and Android in general, I guess. Thanks.
So, for future users:
Are you looking to sync Android WhatsApp with Syncthing but unsure about what to ignore? Simply add *. & .* to your Ignore list, and you’re good to go.
I’ve been trying to debug for a while why scanning takes such an ungodly amount of time for the WhatsApp backup directory and it even seems to never finish on one of the phones - in the end it seems to be nothing, except that it’s just slow file access in modern Androids and somehow the scanning gets restarted (I don’t know why, maybe network change?) so it never gets to finish.
Anyway, looking for what to exclude it seems that these dot files don’t exclude too much cruft to matter, and what’s more there are some files under Media/WhatsApp Documents/Sent that look like DOC-20240104-WA0001. which are actually regular files of all kinds not only docs (pdfs, jpg, etc.). Not sure what kind of sharing triggers them to be saved like this (as there are other documents saved with their real name and extensions) but surely they shouldn’t be excluded if one wants a complete backup.
TLDR I wouldn’t bother with the exclude list, and it might even do more harm than good.
I’ve had the same scanning problems with Whatsapp media sync for ages, and I think I have solved it for me today.
I’ve played with the Webinterface->AdvancedSettings->Folders->[for me: AndroidMedia]
After that the scan of ~ 40000 images finished for the first time since August within ~1 minute.
I can confirm this works! Thank you @thepartisan! It’s being days suffering with this and it finally syncs. Something to note:
this should be enabled on Android as it’s case-sensitive. MacOS and Windows on the other hand are not so this check should still be disabled.
Me? I have this running on a docker container in linux so I can enable Case Sensitive FS on both.
(if the destination folder is Receive-Only is the Case Sensitive FS even useful ? dunno)
User storage on Android is not case-sensitive, only internal partitions are. Please be aware that if you enable this setting for folders located on the user storage (which is basically 99% of use cases, unless the device is rooted and you’re syncing normally inaccessible files), you risk losing your data.