Help: Newer files overwritten by older files


sonny

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Hi!

A bit of a crisis here! I have my old pc which I now use as a back up for my new pc placed on another site and using Bittorrent Sync as the syncing method. Tonight I discovered that files from the old pc has been transferred to the new pc if the files exists on both pcs, even though the files on the new pc as newer dates! That means that the files that I have continued to update when I got my new pc suddenly is back to the old pc version.

How can this happen? I was sure Bittorrent Sync should check the dates on the files and transfer the newest?

I thought I would find the delete files in the .SyncTrash folder but there are none of those files there. The files are not in the Recycle bin either.

I run Windows 7, is there a way to get the the files back?

Thanks in advance!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Same situation here. Older folders were on Linux Mint machine. Newer folders were on Windows 7. Older files which were x-copied to the Linux machine few weeks back overwrote newer files after Sync 1.0.134 was installed on both.

I don't have the time now to reproduce this with logs, I need to invest the time to take a step back (fortunately, files are still versioned by Cubby. Was planning to abandon it, but looks like Sync needs some more stability).

I imagine reproducing the problem would be relatively easy, just xcopy something, change it on one side and after that start-up Sync on both machines.

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If you're experiencing a case of newer files being overwritten by older files, there are a few things to check;

Firstly, check that the system clock on each device you're syncing is correct

Secondly, with BitTorrent Sync not running on any of your devices, check your folders for the presence of any .!Sync files (i.e. partially synced files), and delete all of these files, then restart BitTorrent Sync and see if that resolves your issue!

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First suggestion - not an issue, machine clocks are almost identical and the timestamp difference between files was a matter of weeks.

Second suggestion - it is difficult to take that step back, currently (after the issue already happened) there are no .!Sync files anywhere.

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Likely this is not related, but posting it, just in case. I just noticed in the sync.log an IO error for some of those files which were overwritten:

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] IO Error:1168 line:390 align:-99 pos:-99 count:16384 actual:14848

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] ReadFile error: Name1.xls:0:16384:16384:3

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] IO Error:1168 line:390 align:-99 pos:-99 count:16384 actual:10240

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] ReadFile error: Name2.xls:0:16384:16384:3

I wrote that it is likely not related because there are more files which were overwritten which don't have an IO error, only two above have this entry in the log.

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[2013-06-02 12:35:18] IO Error:1168 line:390 align:-99 pos:-99 count:16384 actual:14848

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] ReadFile error: Name1.xls:0:16384:16384:3

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] IO Error:1168 line:390 align:-99 pos:-99 count:16384 actual:10240

[2013-06-02 12:35:18] ReadFile error: Name2.xls:0:16384:16384:3

Were these .xls files open/being editied in Excel at the time by any chance?

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I am not 100% sure, but I think not. For sure no MS Excel was open (I don't have it in these machines), only potentially Open Office (and I think it does not lock xls files, but rather writes a hidden .~lock* file to inform other OO instances about that).

At that time I was setting up BitSync folders, so I do not think I was doing anything with those XLS sheets in Open Office anyway.

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If it would help, I had to go through versioning history of all files, so have some more details as follows:

Files were originally copied 10 days back. On BTSync syncing today, all new files (younger than 10 days) were copied OK, but the 4 files which were updated in meantime were wrongly synced. Since there were actually 4 error messages from the log quoted above (on the "newer" machine), 2 IO Errors and 2 ReadFile Errors, if they are actually 4 separate incidents, not 2, it may give hints on the underlying issue. And BTW, all 4 of those were XLS files. Also I am certain that for sure not all those 4 XLS were open at the time of the errors.

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  • 1 month later...

Update on this issue.

Happened again today to me, with BTSync latest version 1.1.127. BTSync again decided for some files that older copies are the "current" versions. This time it was a couple of .doc files and a .xls again.

Debug logging mode is on and on one machine sync.log is useless - has a 117 MB with showing just last 10 minutes of records (9133 useful lines and rest huge whitespaces), so no real help from it (the issues happened hours ago).

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1. Make sure all your devices are running 1.1.127

2. Make sure the system clock on all your devices is correct

3. With Sync not running on any of your devices, locate & delete any .!Sync, .SyncTemp, or .SyncPart files in the folders you're sharing. Do this on each device. Once you have done this, restart Sync on all your devices

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The problem seems to be that during reindexing (which has been started by every one of the last updates) all local files are always regarded as newer than existing files on the sync peers. Even if the updated client has been offline for four weeks. Which is really annoying.

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@GreatMarko - point 1 (BTSync version) - it was already like that, point 2 (clocks) - not an issue as mentioned before, point 3 (delete sync temp files) - I will try that, but I think ChrisH is on to something,

@ChrisH - actually my case also fits to your description. I got older files from PC that got BTSync program updated to new version.

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Same issue, I just lost several days worth of work on a site for a client. I'm going to have to do the whole thing again. I have now scheduled a backup every two hours, and I am going to have to start from almost scratch. Massive pain in the tits.

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I had the same issue. I recognized this with Microsoft Office documents, but it may apply to others as well. When creating a .docx file on computer A it gets synced to my other comps B & C, as it should. When I work on that doc, it will at some time point be back resynced from my comps B and C to A, although the latest version is on A, and the others have never been touched. I got only a small notification that "file.docx has been downloaded", which I dismissed as "the file mods have been synced to my other comps". So I continued to work on it.

Using autosaving and saving shortcuts to save, I never recognized that the document I am working on is not any more in its original location but in $share/.SyncTrash. I kept modifiing this file and saving for approximately a week. Today, after restarting by using the doc in the finder, all changes were missing.

It took me 5 hours to find that they are in SyncTrash and my current version has been replaced with an old one. Auto backups did not cover the files, as they were not anymore in the correct folder. Thus, there is an issue in identifying opened files, which should be protected, and file modification date, since they will get the date of the transfer and are thus always newer after transfer!

OSX 10.8.4 on all computers. BTsync 1.1.27. Hope this helps to solve the issue. Reported as a bug in the bug-report feature of the app.

I closed the app on all my devices, because this is a NOGO-Issue. But apparently it keeps syncing and syncing! I am not able to identify the correct process to kill via top or ps aux, so I would be grateful for the process name. I will not use BT anymore until this issue is properly closed.

Cheers, Alex

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