What is the point of file sync setting in Android?

[christianlupus]

Hello to all,

this is no concrete request for help but rather a generic question:

When installing the Android file sync client, you can go the Android settings → accounts → (Your NC account name). There you have the option to enable a toggle for Files.

What does this setting control? I do not understand the use case here. Can you explain this to me?

Thanks
Christian

[j-ed]

See

What is Settings > Accounts > Nextcloud > Sync for?

No, it does not. You have to manually push “Sync”. In my opinion, it is the right behaviour, because I am a fan of “manually” or “automatically”; something in between is/can be confusing and incalculable. Before I started using the Android app, I did a lot of testing and here are two of my thoughts about the sync and offline files thing: There are fundamental UX problems with “offline files” and “Sync”. First of all the “Sync” is not sync! It is kind of one-way sync or pull, but neither mirr…

[christianlupus]

Unfortunately, this does not help me much. It just adds the term keep-available-offline files. What are these? Where can I define/see them?

Or did I just accitendially skip the relevant section in the settings?

Christian

[j-ed]

Nextcloud usually synchronizes the list of available files and creates a virtual file list, so that you can see which of them are avaiable on the server. Once you selected a file it will be marked with a tick mark and synchronized to your device so that it is still available if you are not connected to the server (aka offline files). All local files can be seen/checked using the “on my device” menu entry.