FFS 5.5 Renamed All Files with "(1...

[remmian]

I am new to this program and it looks great, but it renamed all the files it
was mirroring by adding a "(1)" to the end of the file name. That's 1.6 GB
worth of files. It renamed them on the laptop itself, and on the memory stick
(of course) that I was mirroring TO. Luckily I just ran backup the day before,
so I can restore everything, but can someone please tell me why it did this
and how I can avoid it?

System is W7 Ultimate 64bit, mirroring to a 4GB dedicated USB stick. FFS is
newest version, 5.5. Thanks so much!

[Zenju]

Can you provide more details about what you were doing? Is this problem
reproducible?

[remmian]

Thank you for responding, Zenju.

I have not tried to reproduce it or even open FFS as I just got it all
restored and was hoping to find out how to avoid it before I give it another
go. But I understand that's how you might be able to tell what happened. IAC
here's what I was doing or wanted to do:

I have two laptops for redundancy, both with identical systems. In fact I
migrated one system to the other (adaptive restore) so they would be identical
so that if my primary (favorite) laptop crashed, I could continue on the
backup laptop until I straighten the other one out.

There are certain files I work on every day and I don't want to run a backup
everyday just to backup these files. My drive is divided into several
partitions, so I put most of my working files in F:\Docs (which also contains
subfolders). There are two other folders on F:\ I added to the FFS job, and
one folder under C.... C:\Program Files (x86)\Stickies.

So my intent was to mirror these four folders (along with their subfolders) to
a dedicated USB stick, Laptop#1 -> USB .... that I could then take to Laptop#2
and reverse the process.... updating that laptop by mirroring the opposite
way: USB -> Laptop#2. Thus my daily changing files would be backed up between
official backups, and I could update my 2nd laptop at any time.

So I installed FFS on both machines, and then added the folders to FFS on
laptop#1 by clicking the green + arrow, and chose the empty USB drive as the
target...

So it seemed to copy everything to the USB stick and I took it to Laptop#2 and
set it up in the reverse, but when I clicked to compare, I saw that all the
files on the memory stick were augmented with "(1)" at the end of the
filename. Even in nested folders. So I went back and looked at Laptop #1, and
sure enough it had changed all the filenames and they were time stamped as
having been changed just a few minutes before when the job ran....

Any idea why this happened?

[remmian]

Just an update that I copied over the files including the ones on the memory
stick with the originals that did not have "(1)" in the name... and took the
stick to Laptop #2 and FreeFileSync worked beautifully, putting all the
updated files where they belong.

Went back to Laptop #1 and worked on some files and FFS again worked
beautifully, backing them up and then restoring them to Laptop #2. So don't
know what happened yesterday, but it's working now.

And thanks for such a great program, too.

[Zenju]

Very strange. There is no code in FFS that could explain such a specific
erroneous behavior during file copy. The only place in FFS that uses a
(<number>) naming convention is for versioning. Were those files ending with
"(1)" the ones that should be deleted? Could you give a full path sample?

[Zenju]

Also, what is in the log of last syncs (located in
%appdata%\FreeFileSynce\LastSyncs.log for "local" installation or the
installation directory for "portable") FFS logs the same file names it is
processing. This should give some clue what it was doing.

[remmian]

Path was F:\Docs\Text Files\... and all files within this folder, including
all files in all its subfolders and nested folders... I did see the log but
can't really make sense of it though I did see this path there and the folders
and files with a "(1)"... and no, they were not the files to be deleted, but
all files in the folders, period.

It hasn't happened since, happily.

[Zenju]

> I did see the log but can't really make sense of it though
Can you please send me the logfile? If the (1) is in the log, this could be a
problem with FFS. Analyzing the log should give a clue what has happened.