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Sync Virtual Folders

Posted: 2020-12-03, 05:30 UTC
by MVV
I think it is really a time to start syncing virtual folders. There are more and more devices that may only be connected as a virtual folder and it is very annoying that TC can show folder contents, file attributes etc but can't sync by these values. I think it shouldn't be very hard to read required information from virtual folder structure for syncing and then copy required files just like TC does for virtual folders. It will be much more useful than now.

Perhaps it is a question how to pass virtual path to Sync dialog if they don't have visual form (I don't know exactly how they can be referred but do know that path that TC displays is fictional), but in such case some kind of placeholder or pseudo-variable may be used, e.g. %$LEFT_PANEL% for folder from left TC panel, this will already be a huge step forward.

I know that there are some plugins for accessing such devices, but built-in feature would be preferred anyway, and it could be used for cases where plugins don't help.

There should be some kind of interface that could support different implementations (at least partial) for different kinds of locations (physical folder, virtual folder, archive) used in Sync tool.

Re: Sync Firtual Folders

Posted: 2020-12-04, 16:24 UTC
by ghisler(Author)
There are several problems why it isn't supported:
1. Copying from/to virtual folders only works via OLE2 copy and paste verbs. These do not work correctly when passing individual files from separate folders to them.
2. After copying a file to a virtual folder, the folder usually shows the correctly copied timestamp. But when you then look on the device, it often has the current time. When you then unplug and reattach the file, you can see the actual timestamp, which is wrong. Therefore it's not possible to achieve equal directories on both sides

Re: Sync Firtual Folders

Posted: 2020-12-05, 16:57 UTC
by MVV
But maybe you could implement at least limited version with some kind of warning regarding limitations? I believe TC itself could switch folders and copy-paste files much faster than I so it would still be useful. And even if TC won't be able to set timestamps, it could use existing ones so it would do my actions but faster.

I partially solved my problem with your WPD plugin (thanks for it), but it would still be nice to be able to sync all folders that TC can display.