Sync folders entries have disappeared on one computer, GUI shows "No folders"

[trombone]

I have been running Sync 2 successfully for months between two computers and one Android smartphone. 

The computers are on the currently latest BitTorrent Sync version 2.3.5 .

I have just noted that no synchronization has taken place between the two computers for now several days.

While computer A (a 64bit Windows 8) still shows my Sync folders in the GUI, computer B (a 64bit Windows 7) reports "No folders" in the GUI.

When I click in any of my three devices on "My devices", all of them show each other device as being online. Also, synchronization between the smartphone and computer A works fine.

How can I again make BitTorrent Sync on computer B aware of all available Sync folders, so that files get synced again among computers A and B?

 

Edited March 22, 2016 by trombone
grammar

[trombone]

I just realized that this is a known issue, as stated here and here.

On Computer A, I right-clicked one of the Sync folders, selected "Share..." and clicked on the "Copy" icon, in order to get some URL into that computer's clipboard (... weird, whatever happened with showing the plain key on the screen - way more comfortable, especially for non-IT people that don't know about the concept of clipboards?...).

On Computer B, I have manually added the missing "filesystem directory"/"Sync Folder" by clicking Options -> "Manual connection..." and then pasted in the URL from the previous step, then selecting the filesystem directory where files used to be synchronized back and forth to.

Now BitTorrent Sync is showing "Progress" on both machines, computer A showing the up-arrow "a day" ... and computer B showing the down-arrow "10 hours". This is surprising, as actually only very little has changed in either computer's synchronized file system directory since BitTorrent Sync has stopped working. What is especially surprising is that both computers' BitTorrent History show events such as "Remote peer added file $FOO", "Computer $OTHER updated file $BAR" and "COMPUTER $OTHER added $BAZ".

Neither files $FOO, $BAR, nor $BAZ have changed on either computer.

Can you explain what is going on? In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to copy files back and forth that should be treated identical due to identical checksums. 

[Helen]

trombone,

Keys are available only for standard folders, and are visible on "Share" view.

When you add a folder to sync (either via "add folder" or shared key/link) Sync has to build database on this machine (this is where 'peer added file' comes from), and merge folder tree with other peers. During merging, peers can report different time estimations, because they do not know yet how much is there yet to merge. Sync compares file hashes , basing on which decides if anything needs to be re-synced.