Sync .SyncIgnore files between clients

[xelibrion]

Hi there

First of all, thanks a lot guys for such an awesome software.

The question I want to ask - would it make sense to add an option to sync .SyncIgnore files?

This question came up when I was trying to set up synchronization for one of my portable apps. Everything worked great except one detail - this app generates temporary files within its folder and even though I added those files to the exclusion list on machine A, machine B had different version of .SyncIgnore file and was trying so send temporary files back to machine A. This does not seem optimal considering how often those files change. Of course I can tweak .SyncIgnore files manually on each client, but it does seem a bit painful as the mask itself is not simple one.

And it would be great if .SyncIgnore supported the same mask on Linux and Windows machines without the need to change slashes to backslashes and vice versa.

Thanks

[dswd]

+1

That hit me too, I expected those files to be synced. I helped myself by symlinking to .SyncIgnore to some other file that then gets synced.

[Disappointed Cat]

Or it could be applied to incoming files too for selective sync.

[joebush]

Since all peers sync with each other, it wouldn't make sense for one peer to be able to restrict what is synced for all other peers.

Pretty sure .* is left unsynced due to being peer specific.

[dswd]

I think the implications of having different .SyncIgnore files are too hard to grasp.

What does it even mean when a file is being ignored?

- Are changes to that file ignored and not sent to other peers?

- Are changes from other peers regarding that file ignored?

Depending on the answers these questions that scenario could result in a one-way sync for some files or that the files are only synced by a subset of all peers. In all cases this is very hard to understand and even harder to debug as you can not see the .SyncIgnore files of other peers.

[joebush]

Apparently, it only seems to affect outgoing syncs from the peer with the .SyncIgnore file. It will still request files from other peers even though they fit .SyncIgnore.

I would have assumed it would ignore any local and remote files that fit with .SyncIgnore. I.e. that it would ignore all files fitting .SyncIgnore for any BTSync functions, whether incoming or outgoing transfers. Maybe it's a bug.

GreatMarko wrote in another thread that .SyncIgnore should be the same on all peers. But I think he means for the sake of being consistent. If they truly needed to be the identical, Sync would do it itself.

Hopefully, BT is investigating what the smartest solution is here.

[Tel]

I made a suggestion in the wishlist for .SyncIgnoreGlobal which can have a common set of rules that can be synced across all folders. I have a customer with remote laptops but they all uses the same image so I know exactly what temp files will be created during use.

There's already been a situation where the ~$*.doc temp file got copied to another folder and someone started editing that file rather than the original.

I have had to email the modified .syncignore to all the laptop users for them to save the file in the sync folder, thus hopefully overwriting the orginal file

[joebush]

I made a suggestion in the wishlist for .SyncIgnoreGlobal which can have a common set of rules that can be synced across all folders. I have a customer with remote laptops but they all uses the same image so I know exactly what temp files will be created during use.

There's already been a situation where the ~$*.doc temp file got copied to another folder and someone started editing that file rather than the original.

I have had to email the modified .syncignore to all the laptop users for them to save the file in the sync folder, thus hopefully overwriting the orginal file

Or you can just name it something valid so it syncs, and rename the synced version to .SyncIgnore afterwards. Too much trouble to email files.

[Tel]

Or you can just name it something valid so it syncs, and rename the synced version to .SyncIgnore afterwards. Too much trouble to email files.

Much easier to tell someone how to save a file than to have to go through a method of changing the folder views to show hidden files, saving, then unhiding.

[rdebath]

Local .SyncIgnore files would be easy to understand.

All it means is that a file would be sync'd to ".SyncNowhere/The/file/path.txt" rather than "The/file/path.txt".

Any real file at "The/file/path.txt" would be completely hidden from BTSync.

The optimisation would be that anything that the peer would download into ".SyncNowhere" wouldn't be sync'd until tomorrow ... forever.

With local ignore files like that you'd only have to "Ignore" the files on the peer they were created OR the peer that doesn't want them.