windows file attributes vs. samba on NAS - some files keep changing, and being synced

[markusq]

Hi All,

I am using FFS to sync a bunch of computers against a special SYNC directory on my NAS - which thus is kind of a DIY cloud for me ;-).

So far, so trivial. But the computers all use some windows flavour (7 or 8), and the NAS is using samba in some not too recent version (it's a DNS-320 with its default software, I have not checked further). That all works fine, except for one annoying little thing: There a e-mails exported from MS Outlook as files, with the extension ".eml". FFS keeps identifying them as different between NAS and each of the Windows PCs. My guess is that Windows indexing could be writing stuff to the extended file attributes (although I couldn't explain why a search indexer would write to files...), and these attributes are stored on the NAS in a different format, or lost, which then makes FFS find a difference.

So, at each sync run I have a bunch of files that come up as different, although nothing changed.

I suspect there is nothing to configure in FFS to prevent that, except entirely excluding .eml files per filter?

Not being knowledgeable with Windows and Unix file systems, is there anything that I could easily do to make (and keep) the files entirely identical? Simple copying/overwriting very obviously does not do the trick...

Thanks!

Markus

[markusq]

update: I just observed that the same thing can happen (with the .eml-files) when syncing against an USD drive/harddisk. The one I just tried is FAT32 formatted, I cannot tell now whether NTFS formatting on the external drive would give the same result.
M.

[Zenju]

I would check why FFS is syncing them repeatedly. Probably because the modification time or size have changed on either side. Next you need to find out what program is changing the file...