Hi! I seems that selective sync downloads files outside of the folders that I have selected. I am wondering if I am doing something wrong or if this is intended behavior?
I have only selected the folders 3/ and amanuens/ and yet it downloads all files within the Documents folder. No other folders are synced, but all files within Documents/ are synced.
Do you perhaps have a NextCloud folder somewhere (like on your Desktop) that has the entire Documents folder contained within it? I think that would cause what you’re seeing.
So when I installed the NC linux client, it created a Nextcloud folder someplace inside Home. I subsequently dragged it to my desktop. Anyhow, anything in that folder gets automatically sync’d to my Nextcloud. In addition, any folders that I created separate sync settings for also get sync’d to my NC.
Here’s what I see in the NC app Settings page (private info removed):
My issue is the other way around. I have files on other machines that I do not want synced to this client.
In other words, I don’t want to sync certain files from my Nextcloud server to this Laptop because I don’t have space for them. But even with the Documents folder not explicitly selected it still downloads files from within to my laptop.
So the issue is that if I remove these synced files from my laptop they also get deleted from the Nextcloud server. If I then restore the files on the server they will begin to download to my laptop again.
After some digging I found this old closed github issue:
It seems like this behavior I’m seeing is intentional. I feel like this is counter-intuitive and is also not explained anywhere in the documentation. Does anyone know the reason for why they have implemented it like this?
It is a limitation that the desktop files client has to synchronize all the parents folders and fully synchronize them. That is necessary to ensure the folders are synchronized correctly with the server (even if only some of their child folders are selected).
