Known Issues
The following issues and limitations are known to exist in SyncDat 1.1E. Many are scheduled to be addressed in future releases. If any of these issues are of importance to you, please contact DEI Technical Support for information about work-arounds or feature updates.
Individual files transferred by SyncDat must be less than 8 exabytes each, or the maximum file size supported by the host operating system. The total size of all files transfered per client session must be less than 16 exabytes. The maximum number of files which can be transferred in a single syncdat session is approximately eight million, depending on the amount of available system memory (RAM).
Certain characters should not be used in file and folder names because they have special meaning on some platforms. When transferring files between different platforms is is possible for a file name which is valid in one context to cause problems in another. Avoid the following characters in file names:
/ \ : * ? " ' ` ; ( ) [ ] & | ! ~ { } @ $
For example, if you try to upload a file named "recipes:recent" to a Windows NTFS filesystem, the file or its contents may seem to disappear and servedat may log an error because Windows reserves the ':' character for Alternate Data Streams.
If a download is interrupted, it will be restarted from the beginning upon retry. Interrupted uploads may be resumed from the point of interruption.
The SyncDat server takes steps to ensure that files being uploaded are not written to or read from by other transactions. However, the mechanisms for this protection are highly dependent upon the operating environment and are not perfect. In particular, files on network storage devices may be susceptible to modification by other programs while in use. Users should take care not move or modify files which may be actively transferring.
Symbolic Links under Windows Vista and Windows 7 are not replicated. Instead, their targets will be replicated.
In a unix shell environment, the syntax "path1/symlink/../path2/" would access the directory "path2" in the parent directory of the symlink target. Using such a path via servedat will instead access the directory "path2" in the parent directory of the symlink itself. In other words, the path would be resolve to "path1/path2/".
Irregular files cannot be targeted as the destination of a Send. If an irregular file (symbolic link, device, socket, pipe, etc.) already exists at the destination path, then the upload will fail with an "Object Unavailable" error.
The server stores partial uploads using "-sv.tmp" and "-sv.met" files. See the Upload Status chapter for details.
If a transaction fails while the server is under heavy load and the network path is experiencing packet loss, a client may receive a "Lost Transaction" error instead of the exact error message. The exact error message will appear in the server logs.
Restarting the server via SIGHUP, which is necessary to reload the configuration and private authentication files, will interrupt any active transactions. Interrupted transactions may still be resumed.