Mirror synchronization hangs too often on multiple drives

[hwolter]

Hi all

I have recently started to backup my files with FFS. I always use Mirror synchronization which mostly involves HDD drives, internal or external, on Win 11.

At the very beginning, while setting up my first backup files, I didn't have this problem, but I now almost always have it: the synchronization process simply just hangs randomly somewhere in the process. FFS continues to count the time as it passes, but stops estimating time for completion. The progress lines (green and blue) flatten out and no files are copied anymore. The more files are involved in the mirroring, the more often this happens.

The only solution is to force FFS to stop via Task Manager, open it again, compare and synchronize. This might copy another 1k-10k files, and at some point the process will hang, without any obvious reasons...

As a matter of fact, this just happened again while writing this post. FFS will continue counting time indefinitely until I stop it and restart the process.

Screenshot.png (24.89 KiB) Viewed 135 times

Any help?

Best regards,
Henrique

[hwolter]

It probably has to do with zone.identifier being added (probably by Windows) to some files during the copying process. There's no 100% pattern behind, but it often added this metadata even if original files didn't have them. And strangely, it added mostly to my wife's folder and not to mine.

So, the source drive mostly didn't have files with zone.identifier, be it in my folder as in my wife's. The destination drive mostly didn't have zone.identifier in my folder, but my wife's had plenty of them.

When I did a backup of the backup to yet another drive, these blocked files seem to have caused an issue with FFS, even if it did manage to copy them until it finally hung up.

I solved this by using PowerShell to remove the zone.identifier from the files within a drive. This seems to have solved the problem.

Just in case someone has a similar problem...

[therube]

Just a few seemingly relevant links:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4496697/what-are-zone-identifier-files-and-how-do-i-prevent-them-from-being-created
https://cloudbytes.dev/snippets/wsl2-find-and-delete-zoneidentifier-files
https://superuser.com/questions/1692240/auto-generated-zone-identity-files-can-should-i-delete