Intermittent Sync Issues

An intermittent sync issue is when a working Sync fails temporarily or intermittently. These failures usually indicate a temporary condition affecting a particular run of a Sync.

Common Causes

Intermittent issues usually occur due to changed conditions on the remote server. The most common ones are related to timeouts.

Each Sync compares the local files with the remote files. This includes the metadata about files and folders that you would see in a typical folder listing: file size, timestamps, owner, and so on. When a Sync times out, something on the remote server is taking too long to return a response.

A common cause is the size, width, and depth of the target folder on the remote server — how wide and deep the folder structure is and how populated it is with items. When a target folder is very large, recursively listing the structure for all the metadata can take a long time.

Intermittent issues can also occur when target files become too big, when file names are temporarily changed to include unsupported characters, or when a target file is temporarily locked by a remote server.

Troubleshooting and Testing

As a test, use our Desktop App to connect your PC to Files.com and access the remote server of a Sync as a Remote Mount folder, or use the underscore folder instead. In a Terminal or CMD window, run a recursive listing (ls -lR or dir /s) on the folder and see how long it takes.

Timeouts are typically 60 or sometimes 120 seconds. If the listing takes longer than that, you have found the issue.

Remediation

Use a smaller target folder for the Sync, or use multiple Syncs, each on a smaller subfolder, to achieve the intended results.

Where possible, rename files and folders to remove any unsupported characters.

Avoid using source locations that contain locked files.