FreeFileSync Forum

Doesn't it suffice to simply untick "Check once a week" in the Help menu? That puts -1 into my xml in lieu of your ??
Stefan, the "??" was just my placeholder in the question, not the value I have in my XML file (grin), sorry for the confusion!

I did not want to pre-answer the question by ...

We are looking to do a global update to our FreeFileSync installations, and are looking to verify what value we should use to prevent checking for updates.

The value in the settings file is: <LastOnlineCheck>??</LastOnlineCheck>

What do we set this to in order to prevent FreeFileSync from checking ...

Hello again - and no, I do not believe I have asked this question before (grin).

We have the feature for transactional file copies enabled per the recommendation (<TransactionalFileCopy>true</TransactionalFileCopy>), which means that the file copy will create a file with the .ffs_tmp extension and ...

You can start a sync via command line and check that the error code is 0, in which case you can be sure that everything is in sync. If the error code is 1, there are warnings, the most important being conflicts. These are always written to lastsyncs.log. If 2, there is some error that may need to ...

@Michael: It seems we've discussed and resolved this very same problem already:
https://freefilesync.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2096&p=9014#p9014
Yes, I knew this sounded SO familiar and I remember covering exactly this ground - and now I know why this has bubbled up again. My colleague mentioned ...

One thing we have been wrestling with is to find a simple way to determine that the source and targets are completely in sync, so that we know the backup is complete and up to date. Once that is the case, we can update our database record, update a help desk ticket, all kinds of things, but there is ...

I have checked our config and can confirm we are NOT using versioning. Here is our top level sync config:

<SyncConfig>
<Variant>Automatic</Variant>
<CustomDirections>
<LeftOnly>right</LeftOnly>
<RightOnly>left</RightOnly>
<LeftNewer>right</LeftNewer>
<RightNewer>left</RightNewer ...

As we expand the number of people in our backup pool, we monitor the space available on our backups servers closely. When we see a sudden drop, we run a scanner program to find files over a certain size OR cases where, for some reason, FreeFileSync creates *and keeps creating* a sequence of ...

Hello again!
We are using FFS not only for ongoing backups (which is working really well), but also for on-demand system backups as part of XP to Windows 7 migrations. Our configuration settings do not show the progress dialog because the backup portion is embedded in a larger process. Based on ...

Hello! We have been testing the changes in the 5.12 version and are quite happy with the updates you provided, specifically the changes to manage the folder deletion for FFS-owned temp folders. We will update our production implementation once the 5.12 code is production, how soon do you anticipate ...

Thank you again, I think it makes sense for us to keep the lock in place because we are in fact going to have people with more than one machine running FFS at the same time. Even though it might exact a small performance penalty, it seems the safer route.

Hello again!

We are using the "automatic" mode in our sync solution and that is working very well overall. We are also including users over VPN who are syncing with the backup server on site, and while that works very well, the first part of the scanning process does seem to take a long time.

As ...

Zenju, thanks for the clarification, I was trying to keep it as simple as possible given the confusion building around the sequence of events necesary to get this to work. It is all pretty simple once you understand it (grin).

Let me take another look at the content in the Help File, perhaps we can ...

Edgar,
I thought I saw an earlier post with an error you were reporting, and the error is an easy one to make.
You can only pass a FFS_REAL file to RealTimeSync, you cannot pass it a FFS_BATCH file.

So, once you have your RealTimeSync configuration up, the command line you include in your ...

Edgar, the shortcut must include in its configuration the additional command line option passing in the ffs_real file you want to run, you cannot just start up RealTimeSync or all it will do is run in GUI mode, showing you the dialog you are seeing and listing the last set of folders you had asked ...

Ok, hope this helps.
Think of this as two separate steps, each with its own setup.
You are going to use FreeFileSync to create your folder pairs and sync rules and logging and then save that configuration as a FreeFileSync batch file...let's call that "MySyncSetup.ffs_batch".

Scenario 1 - you just ...

Ah, ok!! That makes sense, I think I can simulate this in our environment and will watch for the "moving...to Recycle Bin" message in the GUI and will try to kill the process or drop the network connection before then and see if I can get these new FFS-owned directories to stay behind and then see ...

Can you please clarify this so that I can make sure my testing is on target?
"So a test case could look like: 1. run FFS until at least one file was shown on GUI as being moved to recycler (it's not yet there, just in the temp dir).
When you say "on GUI", do you mean the FFS GUI or actually moved to ...

Thank you for the beta code, we will test it starting today and also try this on users who seem prone to seeing this issue occur.
I wonder how best to simulate this for testing? Does this happen when the user has deleted files and then FFS is doing the folder cleanup on the local drive? Would we see ...

If the user hibernates at work, the connection to our backup share is lost, and then when the user comes out of hibernation at home, and FFS picks up again, the network share is of course now no longer available - and this might be leading to some of these issues. The problem is that now FFS has no ...

Ok, so I need to go back now to the users reporting this "error" to see if these folders actually contain files that were pending a move to the Recycle Bin; if they do, I would imagine they are now considered normal directories and we sync them.
We are definitely seeing a minor uptick in this, but ...

somehow I am losing my entries here (grin)...one more time!
What happens if FFS were to close or quit, or for some other reason, fail to delete those files and remove that directory during a sync event? Would it know to remove those files the next pass or would that now look like a normal real ...

Hello everybody!
We are seeing an occasional failure in our global FFS deployment where people are seeing the sync process creating a LOCAL folder called "FFS YYYY-MM-DD HHMMSS", so something like "FFS 2013-01-17 120506". These folders look like they are duplicating what would have been copied to ...

Here are two ways to solve your problem:
1. Use the versioning option in FreeFileSync and create a folder pair configured to back up JUST the LastSyncs.log file, every time you back it up, it would move your previous backup file based on the versioning option.

2. Create a specific directory to ...

Hello! Quick question about folder "last modified" dates. We are seeing that some folders on the target are getting new "last modified" dates rather than matching the "last modified" date of the source folder.
Is this a known issue or something we can manage via an FFS config file setting?
We are on ...

So sorry for the run on bolding, did not notice that...if there is a way to
edit the post, please let me know.

Hello again! Interesting question, hope this makes sense.

We are deploying a sync solution that uses both RealTiimeSync and
FreeFileSync, and we are already running into scenarios where we would like to
make changes to the ffs_batch and ffs_real files. While we could do this with
our software ...

Did some simple initial testing with "follow" on for symlinks - permissions
errors navigating into those folders. Those go away if I were to run FFS as
admin, but that's not an option really. Secondly, it looks like it would
create a folder called \My Pictures on the target share, because the local ...

Hello again! Interesting scenario, for which I think I have a workaround, but
would like some advice or alternatives if they exist.

Consider the following simplified scenario:
XP system, we sync %csidl_MyDocuments% to
\\backupserver\share\%username%\Documents
This would by default include the ...

One thing to clarify: the directory we monitor on the share is one that nobody
uses, it's basically a flag directory (%synctarget%\online), so that
RealTimeSync will only become active if the client is on the network - because
they can see this flag directory. The only changes they should be getting ...

The reason we do not use the scheduled task has to do with the automation of
the task creation as well as the fact that we are using the RealTimeSync
feature that it will only run if all monitored directories are available, so
we monitor a single, otherwise unused, directory on the network share so ...

Hello again!
We are getting close on our sync solution, which includes a piece of wrapper
code before we run RealTimeSync, which when it triggers, runs another piece of
VBscript which then runs FreeFileSync. While all this is really working quite
well, we have two issues I could use some help or ...

thanks for the update on the approach:

> When FFS updates a file, it revisiones the old file first, by moving it to a
custom folder, preserving it's modification time. Then the new version is
copied over. This is the sequence of steps, at least conceptually. This means
the versioning folder never ...

@Zenju - the current active version does have the right created date and
last modified date, but the revisioned file does not. What do you see in your
tests with revisioned files?

What date *should* we see on the revisioned file? I totally agree, FFS
normally preserves the file modification times ...

I am seeing something odd with regards to file modified dates after migrating
to the 5.7 version and using the new versioning option. The new version is
being created in the right place, using the new (correct, as in original)
folder name with versions of the file there, but the versioned file does ...

So far so good, that is looking much better! Now I need to have a play with
the file versioning stuff for the home backup...

Ah, I see it, downloading now....and testing for file format changes as well.
Thanks again!!

Excellent, is that now production ready or can we download a pre-release
version to test??

We are trying to use an environment variable in the command line field in
RealTimeSync, but this keeps failing when RealTimeSync tries to execute the
command line. The environment variable does resolve if you add it as a
directory to monitor, so we know that RealTimeSync can resolve it.

I have ...

Thanks for the reply, I did some testing to see this all in action.
I used Process Explorer to look at the environment var you set in RealTimeSync
and yes, it's there.

I made a single change to a file 10 levels deep in "My Documents", and when
RealTimeSync triggered, I could see in %changed_file ...

Apologies, I know this is a laundry list of questions re RealTimeSync...

Trying to get clarity about the triggers for RealTimeSync, so let me outline
how I think it works. Please correct as necessary and help me understand if we
have configured RealTimeSync for the best degree of success to ...

Let me cast my vote on this very interesting discussion - and I am really
excited about this change, as I have been doing a lot of clean up of older
"monthly" folders based on a folder naming convention designed to let me do
the purging more easily.

My vote: keep it simple at first and implement ...

The update is working as expected, thanks very much!

Here is a sample header from a recent sync event, about 40 seconds to do the
directory comparison (I am using complex filters to keep the number of
directories in to compare lower, that seems to be one way to help increase the
speed a bit ...

Wow, even better, I did not see your second comment in time! What version
would this be in, 5.6?

Ok, good to know. Here is our thinking, which perhaps I will revise based on
the data in the log.

Our plan is: once a day, we will take the last log from a sync event, parse
out the header info for duration, number of items, and amount of data and
report that to our database as a "heartbeat ...

Ok, no idea how that worked, but now the code piece looks great! Ignore my
second comment :-)

Sorry, did not realize that the codify tag would be so terrible! Here is the
log data again:

Warning: Recycle Bin is not available for the following paths! Files will be
deleted permanently instead: Info: Processing folder pair:
Info: Processing folder pair:
Info: Processing folder pair:
Info ...

Looking over the logs, there is a difference between the overall time reported
and the start and end times recorded in the log file.
A recent log file shows the following summary:
Items processed: 5 (5.56 MB)
Items remaining: 1 (0 Bytes)
Total time: 00:01:28

and the time-stamped entries show ...

Thanks, and yes, I have more questions coming...sorry!

Thank you for the detailed response, that all makes good sense to me.

In the case above, does the code update the remaining sync.ffs_db to reflect a
new partner database file or does it continue to reference an obsolete
database (and with no ill effects)?

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