FreeFileSync Forum

Is there a way to make a filter which will filter a range of files by name? I have a sync to do which would be split across two removable drives. I want to place files with names starting 0-9, a-m on one drive, and n-z on another. I don't want to create 36 includes across two sync definitions if I ...

Useful to know, even if it's a bit of a kludge.

I disabled it globally (I think - need to wait until it runs again). You have to edit the XML file in the AppData folder.

Did this ever get a local setting?

Hi John, I wasn't familiar with the RTS function but I tried it. As I see it, it looks for changes in the file system and then starts FFS to handle them.

As far as solving the issue I have, I am not convinced it will work because eventually the FFS main program should trigger the issue. I cannot ...

I don't know of another solution other than running xvfb - can you clarify? Google says: While Xvfb (X Virtual Framebuffer) is not strictly deprecated by the upstream X.org project, it is increasingly considered legacy and is being phased out in modern Linux environments in favor of more robust ...

Really, really would like to see this! After a few days (weeks?) my cron backups fail with errors related to GUI. Unless I am doing something wrong in my script...

"Authorization required but no authorization protocol specified"

"Unable to initialize GTK+, is DISPLAY set properly?"

OK, I know what is happening (and reproducible, but I fixed it on my end).

My FFS task is to backup changed files on one NAS to another. It runs on a small Ubuntu server and it scheduled with cron to run in the early morning.

The issue was that my main PC, where I want to write the log file to ...

Interesting you asked, because I checked and it seems the last 2 runs have been fine. Before that it happened a lot of times, so many I believed that the run wasn't happening. It was only after I discovered the ".config" folder was being used I realised it was erroring on the log folder I set and ...

I have a mounted folder (on a Linux machine) to my PC and am running FFS as a user cron job on the Linux machine. I want to place the FFS log onto the PC. After job completion, I get this error.

03:03:35 AM Error: Cannot write file "/mnt/nuc/ffs_logs/[FFS SVR] SD to FileStore 2026-03-13 030001.435 ...

There's a few threads around which document how to get FFS to run with cron (I am setting up some automated backups). However these involve a kludge using (deprecated) xvfb.

Perhaps an enhancement to enable FFS to run without requiring any GUI resources would be possible? It runs fine in Windows ...

I use the GUI all the time too, but in the case of unattended systems I really like the idea of a small Linux virtual machine handling this automatically for me. My Windows PC also has some scheduled runs of FFS, these work fine, but my PC is not always on. It would be great if Linux supported this ...

It does look like this is a workaround for the issue of running an FFS batch job headless, but since xvfb is both deprecated and buggy (because you have to kill it manually for example), a better fix would be to make FFS capable of running batch jobs in a headless environment without needing any GUI ...