PeerLink Help > Running and Managing a File Collaboration Job

Starting a File Collaboration Job

Before you start a file collaboration job for the first time, you need to decide how you would like the initial synchronization to be performed. There are two main options:

1.	Have the file collaboration job perform the initial synchronization based on the configured File Conflict Resolver strategy.

2.	Pre-seed all participating hosts with the correct folder and file hierarchy for the configured Root Folders before starting the session.

If you have a large data set, we strongly recommend that you perform the initial synchronization manually by copying the data from a host with the most current copy to all other participating hosts. This will only need to be done the first time that you run the file collaboration job.

If you choose Option 1, simply press the Start button to begin collaboration session initialization. Otherwise, pre-seed each participating host with the necessary data, then press the Start button.

Initialization Process

The initialization process consists of the following steps:

1.	All participating hosts are contacted to make sure they are online and properly configured.

2.	Realtime event detection is initialized on all participating hosts where file locks and changes will be propagated in real-time to all participating hosts. You can view real-time activity and history via the various Runtime Views for the open job.

3.	The initial synchronization process is started, all of the configured Root Folders on the participating hosts are scanned in the background, and a listing of all folders and files are sent back to the running job.

The background directory scan results are analyzed and directory structures compared to see which files are missing from which hosts. In addition, file conflict resolution is performed to decide which copy to use as the master for any detected file conflicts based on the configured File Conflict Resolver settings.

5.	After the analysis is performed, all files that need to be synchronized are copied to the pertinent host(s).

Stopping a File Collaboration Job

You can stop a file collaboration job at any time by pressing the Stop button. Doing this will shutdown the real-time file event detection and close all running operations (eg. file transfers, etc.).