Last week, I took two selfies. I remember it well because I had this cool Torproject.org swag and wanted to thank the person who sent them to me. Then I forgot about it, then I remembered I needed to send those pics, so I looked on my phone again, and the photos were gone.
Strange. I could have sworn I took those pictures! And I remember I did because I took two photos: the first was blurry…
And then I remembered the syncthing-gtk desktop client notified me that it “deleted two files to reflect remote changes” or something like that. I didn’t quite pay attention to it at the time, because I keep getting those notifications when I login and I got alert fatigue. But now I can’t help but think that syncthing tried to sync the folders and decided the files should be removed.
Is that possible? Did Syncthing destroy my precious photos? How does it decide to copy files from device A to device B instead of deleting files on device A when they’re not present on device B? Could this be a timing issue?
One idea I had was that maybe the phone’s hardware clock is set to UTC but the desktop client’s hardware clock is set to local time, and that Syncthing gets confused by that?
Or maybe it’s a bug in syncthing-gtk? I’d be surprised because it really uses the same syncthing underneath, right?
I have since then set the folder as “send-only” on the phone, and enabled revisions, but that’s really worrisome, I must say. I use Syncthing quite a bit and the idea that it would delete files like this is kind of terrifying.
Those are the different software versions:
- Phone: Android 11, Syncthing from F-Droid (probably n 1.12.1)
- Desktop: Debian GNU/Linux “stable” 10 (buster), syncthing 1.0.0~ds1-1+b11, syncthing-gtk 0.9.4.3-1
Thanks!
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