Contact

If you want to report a problem or suggest a new feature for the next version of SyncTime, please write a comment on this page. Every feedback is welcome!

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689 Replies to “Contact”

  1. Hi there,
    I am trying to use your SyncTime software. I would like to use it to do a full volume backup of my iMac HD, can you help me get this setup? I tried to use it but get an error, message = ‘An error occurred’ ….. with a number 297 with a red dot.

    Thanks
    Daniel Meehan

    1. SyncTime is not meant to make a full backup of your Mac. There will be many system directories which the app has not enough privileges for and which will raise errors. You can read more about this in this help topic: Sync errors.

    1. The home page lists the main features and shows how to get started if you don’t know where to start.

  2. Hello;

    I use the current version of Synctime.
    I like this software. This software is easy to use.

    But now the problem.

    Before I updated to the version 12.0 beta, the network drives were
    automatically loaded if they were not present.
    This no longer happens.

    THX
    Kai

    1. This seems indeed to be an issue with macOS 12 beta. It’s not the first time that a beta version of macOS introduces a problem that is fixed before the official release. I will keep an eye on this and notify Apple if necessary.

  3. Hi
    Great app! I’m got v 3.5 since a few hours and I love it. But I have a problem: I get lots of “error setting metadata”, nothing serious, because my files get copied anyway, but very annoying.
    Any way to disable this error login, and get all green lights?
    Thanks, actually considering SyncData as main backup system.

    1. It appears that the destination drive doesn’t support Finder tags. Disabling the option “Always synchronise tags” should fix the issue.

  4. Hi –

    I’ve installed “SyncTime Lite” from the app store and tested is. After closing the app, I cannot see it reopen and I do not believe it’s running after I open it. It appears to be an awesome app for making mirror backups that I need to do. I’m new to MacOS and need a solution like this one. I will surely pay for the Pro version but concerned this one isn’t working for me so I am holding off to get this up and try a couple more tests.

    My MacOS System Version: macOS 10.15.7 (19H1217)

    Also a suggestion. When creating a new sync item, I noticed you can use a “group”. If I’m in a group that field auto-populates with the group but if I’m in “all” and create a new sync item, I cannot select from the available groups to add the item to.

    Thanks and best regards – Fred

    1. The fact that you cannot reopen it is an issue with SyncTime Lite (related to the fact that sync items are not restored on the next app launch) which I will fix this in the next update, but in the meantime, you can just reset the preferences by opening the Terminal app (in /Applications/Utilities), copy pasting the command
      defaults delete org.desairem.uSyncLite
      and pressing Enter. You can then quit the Terminal and open SyncTime Lite again.
      In the Groups field you can manually enter any number of group names, they can even be new names. After you close the sync item’s settings window, the groups popup button in the toolbar will be automatically updated.

  5. Nice to meet you. I bought the paid version. It’s exactly the app you’re looking for and it’s very useful. I have a question. I don’t really understand the function of regular expressions. Is it possible to use this to “exclude files smaller than the specified file size from synchronization”?

    1. Regular expressions can be used to filter the filename or the Finder tags of the file, as specified in the same menu where you can toggle between plain text and regular expression. Currently there is no way of filtering out files with a certain size, but you are free to let me know about your use case so that I better understand your needs.

    1. I will add a couple more languages in a future release, but please don’t expect the website to be translated as well (at least not from the beginning), since that would require quite some time.

    1. I don’t understand Chinese but the automatic translation tells me that you’re asking about SFTP support. At the current moment, SyncTime only supports reading files from volumes visible in the Finder. Adding extra support for internet protocols would take a big amount of work; I don’t exclude that it will happen one day, but for now, you will have to resort to some other apps that allow you to mount remote SFTP volumes in the Finder (there should be at least one in the App Store).

  6. Hey there,
    thanks for the great app!

    I have 2 questions respectively feature suggestions.

    1. Is there a way to run a backup-sequence? For example: Start with SYNC1 and after it finishes move on to SYNC2 and so on.. This would help my Workflow immensely. Right now I have to run my sync-group multiple times to get every file synced.

    2. Could there be a way to share Sync-Groups so one could use the same settings on multiple machines? Maybe an option over iCloud would be great!

    Thanks in advance!
    Max

    1. 1. You could probably do this with dependencies, which you can specify in the Advanced tab of the sync item’s settings.
      2. You can export sync items from the context menu or by dragging them to the Finder. I though about adding iCloud syncing in the past, but came to the conclusion that it doesn’t make too much sense, since you would still have to confirm the source and destination folders for each device to which you synchronise to (that’s because App Store apps are sandboxed and only allowed to access specific files after you explicitly select them in an Open panel). Also the paths for the source and destination folders could potentially be different depending from which device you access them.

  7. Hello,

    I recently acquired SyncTime Lite from the Mac App Store and wish to use it to update my website.

    I’ve created a sync task called “Media Centre” inside a group called “www.ganahee.com”. The source and destination are as follows:

    Source: Ganahee’s MacBook Pro, 2018/Users/ganahee63/Documents/Ganahee’s Media Centre Site
    Destination: Ganahee’s Server Box/Applications/Abyss Web Server/htdocs

    The sync appears to work with the items in the root of the htdocs folder, however I get an error informing me it can’t save the file “archive” inside the folder “htdocs” because a file with the same name already exists.

    My site design is:

    Main files, such as index.html, streams.html, archive.html, etc, are in the root of htdocs.

    In the root of htdocs are sub-folders: “Archive”, which contains 3 sub-folders: “Genres”, which contain individual genre pages, “Pages”, which contain all other pages which branch off from the genres pages, and a symlink, called “shows”, which points back to media which exists on an external 8TB drive.

    Unless I’m thinking incorrectly, SyncTime Lite should check the root of the drive to see what’s changed, then overwrite that. Next, it should check each sub-folder (specifically the 2 main files in “Archive”, “Genres” and “Pages”, for differing files and again, only overwrite that which has changed. SyncTime Lite should probably ignore the “shows” folder, since I manually place content onto the drive where it resides, although I could probably create a “shows” folder in my source hierarchy, place the needed content into this folder, and have it update the “shows” folder, on the destination, whenever I perform a manual sync each day.

    Am I setting things up correctly? Am I doing something wrong? If so, what?

    I should point out that the “htdocs” folder lives inside an application’s folder, in the destination’s Applications folder, called “Abyss Web Server”. I don’t appear to be getting any permissions errors, that I can tell, so not sure that’s the issue, but thought I’d mention it, just in case.

    Any help will be greatly appreciated, as this app looks to be very useful, seems easy enough to set up, and will be worth the $8 USD, if I can get it working properly.

    Regards,

    Ganahee

    1. The problem seems to be that SyncTime does not yet take into account whether the volume is case sensitive or not, so having the same filename on the source and the destination differing only in the case of the characters will produce an error. I will fix this in the next update.

  8. Hi, great app! but I’m getting errors when syncing newly created folders in Source when the Destination is on my NAS. They *are* created in the Destination but SyncTime says: “error copying [folder name]”. This happens for both manual and automatic sync.

    The only way to get rid of the error message is to restart SyncTime.
    Everything works after the restart.

    1. Unfortunately I was unable to reproduce the issue. Sometimes some devices implement specific file actions which could result in wrong or weird behaviour with SyncTime or other apps, which may be the case here. I will keep an eye on this to see if I have the chance to test it with the devices you mentioned, and if you happen to test it with other devices, whether it works or not, please let me know as well.

  9. I’m a paid user. I’m syncing between my Mac and a folder on my iPhone managed by SMB Server, an app which creates a LAN drive/folders in my iPhone. On the Mac, I can see the data and move/copy/delete the contents between the Mac and this drive/folders like normal by drag and drop.

    On SyncTime when I try a one-way sync between these folders from Mac to this LAN drive (ie make a replica copy of my Mac folder), I select the option Destination/Remove files not on source, SyncTime crashes completely and disappears from the task bar. Activity log says nothing. With this option unselected, the sync proceeds fine but will only copy new files from the Mac to the LAN drive/folder but will not remove deleted files.

    Can you advice?

    1. It seems like the crash is caused by the destination drive apparently having an incredibly big size. I’m going to fix this in the next update.

    1. Currently you have an Activity log window which you can open from the main menu and which shows all file operations performed by SyncTime, but this list is not persisted to a file when relaunching the app. I’m already working on this feature, which will probably be released within the next few weeks.

    1. Yes, you can also sync to an iCloud folder or any other folder visible in the Finder. Just be aware that you cannot select the root iCloud folder (where all the individual app folders are), because that’s only a virtual folder aggregating the locations of the individual apps, so you’ll need to select any of the subfolders. If you are unsure if it will work for your use case, you can always try out the SyncTime Lite version.

    1. In order to move SyncTime from the Dock back to the status bar, you just deactivate “Show Dock icon” in the SyncTime menu.

      1. I seem to be missing something. I activated Show in Dock. Now I cannot find how to unshow it in dock. Therefore I cannot get the icon back in the statue bar.

        1. You can show the Dock again by selecting the corresponding item in the SyncTime menu. Alternatively, you can search for it by typing “dock” in the text field under the Help menu.

  10. Sorry. Me again. Ran my second sync manually. Both source and destination drives look identical. However, when I used Finder to compare contents, the destination drive is almost 2X the size of the source, like it duplicated contents.

    I had made some slight changes to the source contents. When I started sync I noticed it was going to delete/add a lot but assumed it would see only the folder name changed, not the contents the folder.

    I started to look at hidden files but not very comfortable with them. They appear to be very close to the same on both drives. Any ideas where 25gb of data would be hiding?

    1. It sounds like maybe you don’t have the option “Remove files not on source” enabled, so renaming files will currently leave the old version around.

  11. First sync errors with SyncTime resolved with Help information and checking “Exclude Hidden Files.” One remaining issue is the creation of a subfolder called [Orginals]. The subfolder contains (2) files: an image file and a sidecar file. I located the source subdirectory for the files and they are fine. So I deleted the Originals subdirectory on the destination drive and the (2) files on the main drive and synced again. The directory and the files came back. Please advise on why this occurs.

    1. You’re right, currently files hidden even without starting with a period are not treated correctly. I will try to fix this in an upcoming update.

  12. Hi, thanks for your great tool – love it! It’s very simple and working great on my MAC. But I have individual folder pics on each folder icon which you can paste into the folder icon at the folder information page. Unfortunately they will not to be synchronized. Tags are working well, but not the individual pics on the folder icons. Probably you have an idea how to fix this. Thanks & greetings!

    1. There is currently no way of checking whether a file has a custom icon or not: the only way to ensure that the icons are synced is to copy it on each sync for every file, which would make the whole sync 6x slower. I contacted Apple to see if there is a better way of doing this, but this usually takes some time.

  13. *update* I found your information related to filters, specifically excluding a single file. So I created a filter for only “.DS_Store” in order to keep other hidden files. My understanding is that the filter will eliminate syncing of this file in all directories that are sync’d. Is there a way to filter the DS_Store file in only a selected/specific folder path? If you have any other insight about fixing the underlying issue please let us know. And a HUGE thanks again for this app!! It has made my life so much easier.

    1. Usually I would tell you that you can exclude a specific file by adding it to the list under the “Filter following files” checkbox … but I just noticed that showing hidden files doesn’t work in the current SyncTime version, so I’ll fix it for the next update. In the meantime, it should be enough to insert the .DS_Store full filename (or any suffix of it that is unique) in the text field unter “Filter files matching any of the following expressions”.

  14. I’m having a persistent problem with a “.ds-store” file. The error message says:
    “Error removing “/Users/(folder)/(folder)/(folder)/.DS_Store”: “.DS_Store” couldn’t be moved to the trash because you don’t have permission to access it.”

    The file isn’t locked. I’ve moved the file on the source and destination to the trash prior to syncing (after authentication) and the error continues.

    Can you offer any advice?

    I LOVE this app and have been using it for years. I’d be lost without it

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