[O] Ignore pattern when syncing Org-mode files between hosts

[Karl Voit]

Hi!

I wonder how others are handling synchronization ignore patterns
between different hosts.

In particular, I do have "issues" with temporary files of Emacs +
Org-mode like «.#myfile.org» or «#myfile.org#». 

The first one is a symlink which does not bother me as long as I
keep quitting my Emacs instances when leaving a host and as long as
Windows sync does not result in an error because of not properly
handling symlinks. So lets forget about them until someone points me
to a potential issue.

The latter one is an autosave file which takes as much space as the
original file except for the changes in between. This is causing
many MBs of unnecessary synchronization data.


So far, I was using unison file synchronizer which I invoked
manually before shutting down the host I was working with. Therefore
there were no temp files left since I had to save and quit Emacs. A
clean status of my Org-mode files was transferred, no unwanted temp
files synced.

Currently, I am evaluating Syncthing[0] which looks very good so
far. It is a game-changer to be because similar to Dropbox[1], it
synchronizes in background on any change within 60s (by default).
Thus, resulting in symlinks and tempfiles transferred as well.

On the one hand side, I clearly don't want those temp files
synchronized to other hosts because my Org-mode files tend to get
very large[2].  A short test showed that before and after invoking
save-some-buffers() autosave files of about 10MB of data got
deleted. This data was transferred beforehand resulting in lots of
sync overhead I want to avoid.

On the other hand side, I do want those temp files synced because
they contain unsaved changes I'd lose when starting to work in a
different host before saving/quitting Emacs.

I had mixed results when I tried real-auto-save[3] a year ago. This
would be a method to make sure that there are no unsaved changes
older than xx seconds. Somehow, this was not working to my
satisfaction so I had to disable it again.


So how do you handle ignore patterns with sync tools like Dropbox or
Syncthing?


[0] https://syncthing.net/

[1] I'll never trust my (unencrypted) Org-mode files be placed in
    the public cloud like Dropbox or similar.

[2] Several of my Org-mode files holds a couple of MBs of data.

[3] from https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoSave - seems to be down

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