[Spaces At The End Of Folder Names Are Bad...]

Oh, and now periods at the end of folders/files. That would be nice to fix. I still haven't figured out how to access or delete a folder that ends in a "." and has stuff in it in windows. I can see why you would want to sync files that start with periods even though it's not completely kosher since there are .htaccess files for instance. I'm not sure how bad folders that start with periods are or are not?

 

I haven't tried yet, but how do you handle illegal folder names like "CON"?

 

 

 

[Spaces At The End Of Folder Names Are Bad...]

Thanks for the reply. Just found out today that files that start with spaces can also be synced so don't forget fixing folders starting with spaces in your fix too...

[If You Have Sync Issue]

Either long pathname or ignorelist bug

I have 8 peers, all Win 7 x64 or 8.1 x64.  Many files have pathnames longer than 260 characters.  Two days ago, I noticed that one folder had a duplicate with a truncated name:

 

e.g. "Share/Current Work/..." in same folder as "Share/CURREN~1/..."

 

The truncated folder only had a couple files in it, and many empty subfolders.  The regular folder was still present and all of its data seemingly intact.  I resolved this problem in  BTSync 1.3 by modifying the .syncignore files to include the following:

*~*~**~

Accordingly, I modified one workstation's ignorelist so that any file or folder with a tilda would be ignored.  This is where I think I encountered the bug:  The files inside the truncated folder and the regular folder disappeared on all peers.  Immediately, I changed the ignorelist back to its default, restarted all workstations, and began the tedious process of restoring data.  This took approximately 5 hours for tens of thousands of files. 

 

Finally, when all the files were back to their original state (at 3 a.m.), the data loss occurred again.  Originally, the loss occurred (I think) because I modified the ignorelist to include any file with a tilda, but now, the ignorelist was back to default.  I don't know what caused the data loss the second time.

 

Finally, to restore the data again, I completely uninstalled BitTorrent Sync from every machine, restarted them all, then reinstalled BitTorrent Sync and started from scratch.  Luckily I had a backup this time, but I was up all night.  

 

What I think:

I think there is some conflict with BTSync and long pathnames.  This happened in 1.3 also, where truncated/shortened folders (with a tilda) would appear next to the normal folders.  Additionally, I think BTSync must rely on truncated names because when I edited ignorelist to ignore all files with tildas, normal folders also disappeared.  

 

However, I have no clue what caused the data loss the second time.  Bittorrent Sync was running with default settings (no changes to ignorelist), and all on version 1.4.82. I have no other software that would interfere. 

 

Please let me know if you need additional information.  I don't have logs, unfortunately, as this happened out of the blue.

I'm not in any way official support, but I will tell you that windows itself, the windows api, doesn't support files names longer than 260 characters (and that includes the full path and extension). Even beyond Bittorrent Sync, you're asking for headaches to have long file names.

[Spaces At The End Of Folder Names Are Bad...]

I'm not sure of how you mean to handle illegal file names across platforms, but I would suggest that if a mac folder ends in a space that you don't sync that folder to a windows computer...

 

After having issues in the windows sync folder, I had the mac use make a "test " folder and it synced. I had to delete the folder from the command line with the unc path. I've not had the time to try making other folder/file names on the mac that would be illegal in windows, but I hope you already take care of illegal names and this just slipped by.

 

1.4.103 on the pc side

not sure on mac version

 

-Michael

 

edit: How the end user can deal with the directories with spaces at the end

 

If you have the same issue and need to delete the folders in windows, I found going to an administrator command prompt and typing the following works. replace the c:\direcory\directory with whatever your folder name really is. Make sure it's empty first. Note there is a space before the second quotation mark.

 

rd "\\?\c:\directory\directorywithspaceatend "

 

If you end up with c:\direcorywithspaceatend and c:\direcory, you'll have to delete the one without the space first from the command prompt. I've now seen that if you have both that the files disspear from the one with the space. But if you delete the one without the space that files reappear in the one with the space so that you can move the files out and then delete the one with the space. What a mess!