Local Sync Vs. FTP Sync

[cjschmit]

I am running into and interesting issue and am curious if anyone else has had this and knows what is going on. I have 2 identical external hard drives that I back up all my photography to. When I first started to use SFFS I had both hard drives local to my PC and once I was sure everything was in sync I moved one of the drives off-site and started to use the FTP sync in SFFS. The problem I ran into is everything was in sync when I was local with both drives but as soon as I went FTP some how I all of a sudden had a difference of 40GB between the 2 drives!! This made no sense to me at all so I decided to do an experiment. I brought the one drive back home , hooked it up local again accept this time I synced them locally through FTP using 127.0.0.1 and I had the same results, 40GB difference. As soon as I let the drives sync up normally without FTP there was NO difference between them.

My question is, why is there such a difference between FTP sync and local sync? Is there a setting that I am missing that is causing the FTP sync to see my files differently? My eventual goal is to have 3 drives off site but until I can get this issue solved no drives will be off site. I don't have the upload bandwidth to push 40GB at a decent rate. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
CJ

[superflexible]

Hello,

the usual problem with FTP is the timestamps. You need to study the Sync Preview, because it will show the differences. Probably the files have different timestamps. It could be just an hour or two apart (timezone problem). In that case, you can specify the number of exact hour differences to ignore on the Comparison tab sheet, or you can specify a timezone offset on the Internet (FTP) dialog. You should also check if new files uploaded via FTP can preserve their timestamps. This works with many modern FTP servers but not with others. On the second tab sheet of the FTP dialog, you can click the little "check if supported" link to get some information on the capabtilities of the FTP server. If problems remain, maybe you can install a different FTP server, such as G6 FTP Server from http://www.gene6.com/.

[superflexible]

By the way, to speed up building the file list via FTP, please choose the recursive FTP Listing Command "LIST -alR" which is also on the second tab sheet of the Internet / FTP dialog.

[cjschmit]

Thanks for the info. I told it to totally ignore time stamps but now it goes back and on the same 8GB group of files it deletes them and then copies them over from the source every time. I have even tried creating new profiles but it does the same thing every time it connects. Baffled why it keeps picking the same 8GB of files to delete and re-copy over since nothing has changed on most of those files in 3 years. Does SFFS leave some sort of hidden config file on the drives that it might be picking up old configurations from?

[superflexible]

No there is no hidden anything.

Possibly the file names change via FTP. For example, if the folder or file name has a leading or trailing space character, it gets removed by the FTP protocol. That way, files are uploaded again and again but never arrive the same way they are on the source side.

You need to study the Sync Preview to see what is different. Click on "Show All" in the top left corner and you may see that the same folders or files appear twice - once for the left side and once for the right side, but the folder names might be different.

Just guessing. Anyway there must be a difference and you need to find out what it is. You can also attach a screenshot of the Sync Preview here or send it to our support email address.

[cjschmit]

Thanks again for your help. I spend a few hours last night looking at what files were causing issues and everyone of them had a space somewhere in the file name that was causing the issue. An application I use to sort my photos sometime in the past liked to add a space to my file names as it moved them and that is what was causing my issues. By fixing the 4500 files with spaces I was able to get the sync to work correctly. Thanks again