moving files vs. moving folders

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Posts: 2
Joined: 29 Feb 2016

dracula

Hi,
I just started testing your product and I have a question about the behavior of the source "move detection" of files and folders.
The situation is I have two identical (synchronized) external drive volumes and I always want to keep them synchronized after making changes.
It seems if I move a folder into another folder within the source drive FFS detects the move correctly and moves all the folder's files within the target drive without re-transferring from the source. This is very effective.
But if I move files (as opposed to folders) from one folder to another within the source volume FFS would re-transmit all the relocated files from source to target and delete the old (still identical) copies. For large files this costs a lot extra time.
My question, is it a bug or a feature?
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Posts: 7282
Joined: 9 Dec 2007

Zenju

This should work, too. Maybe you are testing on a FAT filesystem which only has limited support for file ids, or the file modification time changed in addition to the move?
Posts: 2
Joined: 29 Feb 2016

dracula

Ah, now on NTFS it works. The first test was on FAT32 where it still doesn't work. I don't know how this makes a difference though. In no case the (moved) test file has any change.
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Zenju

For future reference I've added information about move detection to the manual:
https://freefilesync.org/manual.php?topic=synchronization-settings