I’ve used the latest Nextcloud sync client (on “computer A”) to sync to my Nextcloud account. It took a while, but all 20 GB of my files have been uploaded and synced.
Now, I would like to link another sync client (on a different computer, let;s call it “computer B”) to my online Nextcloud account. The problem is, I don’t want to wait for it to download all 20 GB of files!
What I would like to do is to use my USB 3.0 external hard drive to quickly move the synced folder from computer A to computer B, and for the sync client on computer B to see that all the files are the same so no need to re-download anything until changes/new files show up.
I just tried to do this, but the sync client on computer B thinks there are differences and is now doing two things:
(1) Re-downloading all the files even though I’ve already moved them into that folder from computer A.
(2) Creating conflict files for every single file so now all of my files are being repeated!!!
This isn’t easily possible. There was a way around, that you copy files with the same time stamps and then copy as well the database and session data from one client to the other. I can’t find the reference, it was back when it was one project called owncloud: https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/523
There are a couple of more topics linked to it, perhaps you can find it somewhere.
As far as I know, ownCloud added checksum but they didn’t provide the feature to keep already synced files. They are however working on a delta-sync function (next major client version). It is certainly something the Nextclouders would like to backport as well: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/417
For anyone pulling their hair out about having to rename dozens or even hundreds of files from (conflicted copy …) back to the proper filename, out of frustration, I’ve written a tool that will go through all sub-folders and do this.