How Do You Guys Go About Reorganising Files Within A Sync?

[Benguin]

My sync has about 4-5 users (I forget which,) including myself, and there are a lot of files and folders within the sync.

 

Today I wanted to tidy up the files and organise them better, which entails moving some files into different folders and deleting some duplicate files I found, ect.

 

The issue: Not all users are online all of the time. When I finish organising everything nicely, another user can come online and they'll have all the files and folders in the original positions, and they'll end up sending /me/ that copy of those files, ruining half of the organising I've done.

 

 

Example: I have file A, and file B inside a sync folder. I decide file B should be inside a folder named "folder B" and I delete folder A since it happened to be a duplicate of file B. Then another user comes online and they send me file A, and file B and put those where they originally were, while I send them folder B and its contents.

 

How do you guys normally get around this issue? Or is this not normal behaviour?

[RomanZ]

@Benguin

 

Indeed, we are aware of the issue. It happens due to Sync logic on handling of files while Sync is off: when Sync comes up and sees that some file has changed (or simply touched), it is will decide to send it to all other peers immediately and treats it as the most up-to-date file.

 

As a results, in some cases file can get back to life if it was deleted on other peer: when Sync which was down starts - it will send the changed files to all other peers, overriding delete event.

 

It is done by 2 reasons:

1) If user copies some older file which it believes to be more important than one was here before

2) Some of the applications (like earlier versions of Picasa) reset file's Modificaiton Time to zero, leaving no chance to survive for photos it edited.

 

Though, we are working to find more user-friendly solution for this issue.

[Benguin]

It'd be nice if I could designate my copy of the files as more important, somehow. (In my scenario, my files tend to be the ones that should take priority.) And for files I delete/move to leave behind a record somewhere, that bitsync uses to inform other clients that those files are gone, and where they've moved to if they were moved.