Brian Shaw Posted March 17, 2016 Report Share Posted March 17, 2016 Hi, I'm trying to recover from an extraordinary glitch in the way Sync is working with my computers. All are running Windows 10. All have the latest promoted build of Sync. I started to notice about a month ago that in some of the folders where I store images, .Conflict files were appearing. I would delete them only to find that they came back. In the past week, the issue has gone nuts. I did a search for "conflict" in File explorer to find I had over 67,000 conflict files. These were all duplicates of files that I hadn't edited in months, so it should not have been the case of files being edited and the change not being captured properly. In most instances, files were being duplicated many, many times. In some instances, I had over 900 duplicates of the same file. It wasn't unusual to see files duplicated over 500 times. I've had to disable Sync as my hard drives were being consumed. After checking carefully, I deleted the conflict files, which cumulatively consumed over 300Gb of space on each of the three machines. I have to ask, is this a bug? If not, what am I doing wrong? I've been using Sync for about 2 years, without a hitch, but this issue is awful. Thanks in advance, Brian Shaw Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted March 18, 2016 Report Share Posted March 18, 2016 Please see this Help Center article: "WINDOWS: Sync doesn't support soft links (junctions), hard links or symbolic links. The use of such links may lead to the appearance of .Conflict files for each entry (file or folder)." Given that you're running ALL Windows 10 devices, this would be the most likely cause of your issue. If however you have different OS's in your Sync "mesh", the cause of .conflict files can be different (see this Help Center article) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Shaw Posted March 23, 2016 Author Report Share Posted March 23, 2016 Thanks GreatMarko for responding. I'm assuming that the soft, hard, and symbolic links issue resides with the use of the Windows Libraries. To help correct the issue, I've tried deleting all affected folders from Sync on all machines, removing all folders from the libraries, and then adding the folders back into Sync. I don't believe there are any other kinds of linkages in any of the folders. I'm not sure if it matters, but as these were long established folders, I've used the secrets to reestablish the connections. Anyway, the problem hasn't gone away. As soon as I started things up again, I kept getting notifications about illegal characters, and how Sync was renaming the files it was transferring. In one folder I had over 25000 duplicated files in a folder that originally housed about 20; all generated in a very short period. Some of the files are problematic to remove, as the files names are so long (.Conflict .Conflict .Conflict .Conflict .Conflict...) that Windows can't remove them. The odd thing is that the issue only affects a limited number of sub-folders, and then not all of the files in those folders. The issue is confined digital images produced by two of my cameras and no others. The file names are as they were named in the cameras, so they shouldn't contain illegal characters. I've been using Sync for about 2 years and never seen this problem before. The files affected are not new, some are over 18 months old. I've been running Windows 10 on these machines since it became available. The problem surfaced about a month ago in a small way, but is now out of control. I've disabled Sync for now. Any help with this would be most appreciated. Otherwise I think I'm going to have uninstall Sync and look for something else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pm Posted March 29, 2016 Report Share Posted March 29, 2016 We have exact the same problems here. Everythinf works fine for about 1 year and since 3 or 4 weeks those conflict files are flooding the computers. We have all Windows 7 Clients and of course no symlinks used. I tried a update to the lastest version today, perhaps it will help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RomanZ Posted March 30, 2016 Report Share Posted March 30, 2016 @Brian Shaw @pm .Conflict files and folders usually appear when filename is mapped into existing another file, which is different though. The most common occurrence for latest version is incorrectly encoded UTF which contains composable characters (like, letters with diacritic signs). I wonder if you guys have any non-latin characters in affected folders? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patoka Posted April 5, 2016 Report Share Posted April 5, 2016 Do they need to rename folders to quid pro quo or e pluribus unum? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RomanZ Posted April 5, 2016 Report Share Posted April 5, 2016 @patoka Renaming .conflict files and folders will cause according renaming of files/folders on other peers - which will help you to identify them and remove ones that you really don't need. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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