Has Anyone Tried To Sync A Windows User Profile?

[deoren]

Hi,

 

I looked over the Unofficial BitTorrent Sync FAQs list and found a section that somewhat matches my situation:

 

General Trouble-shooting:
Not all my files in a given folder/drive are syncing
Possible reasons:

1. Sync cannot transfer files whilst they are currently open/locked/in use in other applications. Closing these files or their respective applications will then allow Sync to transfer them.
2. The files have been excluded from syncing by the exclusion rules defined in the folder's .SyncIgnore file
3. Permissions on the files/folders are set such that Sync cannot access them (this can be the case with some hidden/protected/system files/folders)
4. There is not enough free space on your drive

 

 

 

Reading that gives me the impression that the actual number of files would be listed correctly within the app, but just not transferred for one of the reasons listed. In my case, the number of files is vastly different:

 

Around 3000 listed in the app and around 33,000 actual files

 

Permissions are good as I'm running the app as a local administrator account and I have explicitly reset the Administrators group as having full access and "pushed" permissions down.

 

The source system is a Windows XP Professional (SP3) system and I have rebooted the system to make sure that any locked files for the affected profile (not the local administrator whose account is active) are freed.

 

I've also opened the .SyncIgnore file on the source and a destination system and commented out all default entries (and closed/reopened the app). I even went and found a Windows touch tool that allowed me to reset the last modified time recursively on all files and that only resulted in around 100 more files listed than was previously shown in the Size column (X GB in Y files).

 

During all of this I rebooted the system several times and closed/reopened the client (not just the app window, but the application itself) after each change to test the results.

 

Any tips?

 

I haven't collected the logs and mailed them in yet. I was hoping that maybe this was a known issue with a workaround. If not, I'll gladly collect the logs and mail them in.

 

Thanks.

[RomanZ]

Hi deoren,

 

Recently I've found another reason which might cause sync process to stuck. If you have the same file on different peers written differently (lower\upper case of symbols), sync might get stuck. Also note, that when your logged in after reboot, there will be plenty of processes running under your user account - having dozens of handles opened to your user profile folder. So, reboot is not a panacea to make sure that your sync folder has no open files.

 

The precise reason could be found by collecting debug logs, from all peers. If you do so - please provide logs to me so I can analyse what's happening inside.

 

Also, there was a nice script done by one of community members (yottabit) which allows to sync user profile in a smart way avoiding temp files, caches, and other stuff, useless to be backed up.

[deoren]

RomanZ,

 

Thanks for the reply. In my case I completely removed the content from all peers and created a new Sync Folder on the source system. That system is the one which showed only 1/10th of the total files available in the Windows profile in the Folder view within BitTorrent Sync.

 

Regarding that profile and being logged in, I logged in as the local Administrator account and not the user account tied to the profile I wanted to replicate. This was after a reboot and after applicable file handles should have been released. I can understand that some file handles might be open due to an Anti-Virus app or any sort of file system indexing process, but I would not expect that to result in nearly 30,000 fewer files listed in the client.

 

Regarding the script, it looks pretty handy, but I'll wait to use something like that until BitTorrent Sync matures a little bit and reports the number of files correctly.

 

I'll clear the current log and will enable debug logging on the source system. I'll then provide that log to syncapp@bittorrent.com for further review.

 

Thank you for your time.

[RomanZ]

deoren,

 

If you are logged in as a different user and no processes are running under user account - then you are right, no big amount of handles should be open to user's profile. And even if you do log in under user - 30k files seems too much to be locked, only in the case if some folder in user profile is completely unaccessible for the user... which is unlikely (unless done intentionally).

 

I would appreciate if you drop a short note with ticket ID here or to my PM when you send logs to sync app@bittorrent.

Thanks!