Bug - already existed but excluded folder on dest not deleted

[jantje]

Hi,

I am mirroring folder A to B. I am excluding subfolder AA from A using filter setting. When this subfolder AA already exist on B (for example from a previous mirror which didn't have the exclude subfolder AA setting) it's *not* deleted.
Btw I know I can of course delete all on B and then rerun FFS but the filebackup is very very big so I dont want to do that.

Is there some setting to delete this already existing folder that it's excluded?

greetings Jan

[Plerry]

Not a bug. See viewtopic.php?t=5123

[jantje]

Well it is a bug, the author of FFS clearly doesn't know the definition of mirror. You would expect both source and dest to be the *same* after doing a mirror, so deletes in source are mirrored at dest.
See https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+mirror+file+backup

[jantje]

Okay second thought, maybe it's a feature or does make a bit sense BUT it would be nice to have an option to delete those newly excluded files & folders from dest when they exist so after mirror both source and dest are the same (excluding the excluded files & folders on source side of course).
It's not a viable option to just rerun the task after each exclude setting change with an empty dest when it's several TB's big.
I even want to pay for this option to be included in next release. It's pretty simple to implement (a few extra lines).

[Plerry]

... You would expect both source and dest to be the *same* after doing a mirror, so deletes in source are mirrored at dest. ...

And that is exactly what FFS does when running a Mirror sync, for all files and folders within the scope of the sync.
The problem here is what to do with files and folders that are not in the scope of the sync, because they are not included or are explicitly excluded. The author has chosen to consider such files and folders not to be part of the sync and thus not to process those files and folders at all.

For sure the author can not simply change the behavior as suggested, as that may give rise to many unintended deletions for existing users.
Making it a selectable, non-default option might be possible, but from the past it seems the author likes to have as little as possible selectable options (to me: for clear reasons). But perhaps it could be a flag in the GlobalSettings.xml file, defaulting to the existing behavior.

I'm not sure it will be only a few lines of code.
It might involve a complete overhaul of the architecture, as now suddenly all files and folders need to be processed, not just the ones within the scope of the sync.

[jantje]

That would be a nice approach (non-default selectable option).
Hopefully it will be considered for future roadmap.

[arnold]

Making it a selectable, non-default option might be possible, but from the past it seems the author likes to have as little as possible selectable options (to me: for clear reasons). But perhaps it could be a flag in the GlobalSettings.xml file, defaulting to the existing behavior.

I also need this feature/option. I have tons of software development projects (source codes) which I've already backed up on an external drive, but now I need to exclude their build/compile directories to save some space on the backup drive. Unless I clean the backup destination and start over, there isn't any other workaround.

Is there any ETA for this?

[grv68]

Joined to echo the request for this. Would be most useful.

[toshiki]

I just encountered this issue. I think the current behavior is unexpected. The destination folder should be completely determined by the mirror rules.

I excluded some folder to save space on the destination drive, but under the current behavior I have to manually delete the files in the destination folder.