FreeFileSync Forum

Never mind, I figured it out. It was a permissions problem, but my fault for incorrectly configuring the permissions.

When using FFS to sync files from a network share, I always get an error that FFS was unable to write a sync lock to the source. As far as I can tell, this does not hurt anything as the copy runs to completion.

At a guess, the reason FFS is unable to write a sync lock is that it is not supplying a ...

I've fairly recently purchased the donation edition - one of the reasons for doing so was to enable email notifications.

What I've discovered is that FFS has no settings for sending mail - it just routes all email through an SMTP server somewhere else. There is no way to specify the sender's ...

Thank you for the reply.

It's not a big enough concern to require a fix. Just thought it strange that FFS routes SMTP messages through a server I know nothing about, and that FFS doesn't have a config option for that.

I have recently made a donation, and configured email notifications.

I've noticed that the notifications come from freefilesync.org and are routed through an SMTP server somewhere.

Notifications should be a purely local action on my network, routed through my local SMTP server, and should never ...

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

I just activated the donation edition, enabling me to specify additional threads.

In the Synchronizing window, it only shows me what one of the threads is doing. I can tell that sometimes non-visible threads are doing things in the background.

Any way to see what the non-visible threads are doing ...

Didn't realize I hijacked a thread. I thought this was a general bug-reporting thread. That's what showed up when I searched.

Yes, that's it exactly.

I understand that I could have placed the xml file anywhere, but I didn't, and then I didn't point to it correctly.

Thank you again for your help.

Umm, yes, the missing "appdata" was causing the problem.

But it's missing in my invocation line posted above. When I fixed the invocation line, everything works great. Sorry I didn't notice the discrepancy, but posting here is probably what caused me to find it.

So ignore all the above!

Well, I found it. In my initial invocation line, there was "appdata" missing between howard and roaming.

So ffs was probably using a default GlobalSettings.xml which turned verify off and confused me into thinking my change was working.

I just noticed in the error popup that where it says "howard\roaming" I would have expected "howard\AppData\roaming".

Perhaps that's a clue to the problem?

I recently discovered the neat verify file switch in GlobalSettings.xml. Running into one problem with it. I turned on verify for most of my syncs, but there are a few where I don't want verify. So I created a GlobalSettingsNoVerify.xml with verification off. I then start ffs via a desktop shortcut ...

Okay, thank you for all of your help. I will post something in the "Bugs" topic area.

I spoke a little too soon. There is now a minor, non-critical issue. After the sync completes, I get a popup dialog that says:

Cannot write file "C:\documents and settings\howard\roaming\freefilesync\GlobalSettingsNoVerify.xml.87cb.tmp".

ERROR_PATH_NOT_FOUND: The system cannot find the path ...

No big automation here. I simply have multiple desktop shortcuts that had a target of (for example):

C:\Users\howard\Desktop\Syncs\SyncEdriveDS412.ffs_batch

When I changed the shortcut target to be:

"D:\Program Files\FreeFileSync\FreeFileSync.exe" "C:\Users\howard\Desktop\Syncs\SyncEdriveDS412 ...

Just for clarity, my usual method of invoking ffs is to have a desktop shortcut with a target of the form:

C:\Users\howard\Desktop\Syncs\SyncName.ffs_batch

but I bypassed that for the above tests.

I very much appreciate the response. I tried to follow the directions, but it didn't work for me. Perhaps I misunderstood something.

Here's what I did:

1. Created a version of GlobalSettings.xml called GlobalSettingsNoVerify.xml. Edited the latter file to turn the verify setting to false.

2 ...

That's a cool idea if I were using a command line. But I have a large number of ffs_batch files controlling my syncs, and I don't see a way to mod the ffs_batch file to use a different globalsettings.xml.

Recently discovered the capability to enable verification in globalsettings.xml. Nifty feature!

I would like verification even better if I could choose, on a per-sync basic, whether I wanted verification enabled or not. Another setting in the Sync dialog?

Thank you!

Found other products that can do this, so it is possible that with enhancement RTS could return what was changed, not just that there was a change.

For example, see Directory Monitor.

Considering using RealTimeSync.

Documentation says to configure RealTimeSync by loading an FFS file. RTS then runs on filesystem changes, kicking off the FFS sync. But FFS will then scan the entire source/target directories looking for changes to sync. On large directories this is slow.

When RTS ...

Thank you, Plerry, but that's the obvious answer. I'm looking for an answer that allows me to have one ffs_batch file. This would need some intelligence in FFS.

I knew this would probably fit as an enhancement request, but I posed it the way I did in case I was missing somethings.

I've created an ffs_batch file which performs multiple syncs. Here's an example:

<drive1> -> <drive 2>
<drive2> -> <drive 3>

The problem that I see (apparently) is that scanning is performed before copying. Then when the drive2 to drive3 copy is performed, files are missed because drive 2 to drive ...