Realtime Sync Monitoring USB does not trigger

[MrDenis]

Hello everyone.

I am surely doing something wrong here, but I've gone through all the docs and I can't find anything off with my implementation. In essence, I have Realtime Sync set up to monitor a USB drive that backs up to my PC. While it sometimes works, most of the time adding, deleting or changing anything in the monitored drive does not start syncing. I'm on 13.5/Windows 11.

My steps up to here:
• RTS is running and saying directory monitoring is active
• The USB is plugged in and unlocked (it's a Bitlocker drive, but it is unlocked)
• The monitored drive is referenced by name ([USB Name]\)
• Command line calls a batch file on the root of said drive ("C:\Program Files\FreeFileSync\FreeFileSync.exe" "[USB Name]\Backup.ffs_batch")
• I have an idle time of 60 seconds
• I've tried running the batch file manually in FFS and it works, as well as shows differences
• Log files are not created either, so I know no action was taken

Like I said, it sometimes works, but not always... What am I missing here?
Thanks!

[xCSxXenon]

Whenever RTS sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, it is either a location going in/out or an idle time 'issue'. Sounds like location presence isn't the most likely cause, so it is probably idle time. There may be times when something is accessing/changing something in one of the monitored locations before the 60 seconds is consumed. Try lowering it?

[MrDenis]

Thanks for the lightning fast reply!! I had the idle time set lower before, but it was causing me issues when I was working on files directly on the USB. That said I've lowered it back to default to see and now things got a bit weirder (or clearer we'll see): it did in fact trigger something, but all I saw was the tray icon flash, and the tooltip displayed "Error" for a few seconds.

Edit: Noticed I could see the error message from the tray message... I am so S-M-R-T... *facepalm*

Command ""C:\Program Files\FreeFileSync\FreeFileSync.exe" "[USB Name]\Backup.ffs_batch"" failed.

Exit code 4: Error: Cannot open file "V:\Backup.ffs_batch".

ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND: The system cannot find the file specified. [CreateFile]


But the file is 100% there....???

Thanks

[MrDenis]

Ok so I scrapped everything and started over; no more error message so must have been some bug.

It looks like shortening the idle time works to resolve my initial issue. I'll play with the length to see where the sweet spot is. Thanks again!!