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I'm ~90% sure I configured the blacklist during the initial sync task setup wizard when creating the On-Demand Sync task on May 19, 2024. The wizard appears to offer a filter/blacklist step before the task is created. Once the task exists, the "Sync Rules" UI in the client becomes greyed out — but the per-session config file it wrote is still editable on disk.

(Evidence: the Synology Drive UI log shows wizard-utility.cpp: prepareFilter writing to the per-session blacklist file when session 3 was created.)

The Synology Drive Client's "Sync Rules" UI is greyed out for On-Demand Sync tasks, and the Synology Drive Admin Console in DSM doesn't expose these settings either.

Edit the per-session blacklist filter file directly (no sudo needed):

vim ~/Library/Application\ Support/SynologyDrive/data/session/3/conf/blacklist.filter

(The 3 is the session ID for the On-Demand Sync task. You can find yours in ~/Library/Application Support/SynologyDrive/data/db/sys.sqlite session_table.)

The current contents of this file:

[Version]
major = 1
minor = 1

[Common]
black_dir_prefix = "/Backup", "node_modules", ".git", ".github", "log", "tmp", "venv", ".venv", "__pycache__"
max_length = 0
max_path = 0

[File]
black_ext = "tmp", ".ds_store", ".DS_Store"
max_size = 0

[Directory]
black_name = "node_modules", "venv", ".venv", ".git", ".cache", "__pycache__"

[EA]

Restart Synology Drive Client after editing. The rules also get loaded into a SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/SynologyDrive/data/db/filter.sqlite.

Note: There is also a blacklist.filter inside the .app bundle at SynologyDrive.app/Contents/Resources/conf/blacklist.filter — that one is the system default and gets overwritten by app updates. The per-session file above is the one you actually want to edit.

To verify current active rules:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/SynologyDrive/data/db/filter.sqlite \
  "SELECT * FROM filter_table;"

Folder names excluded from sync (filter type -13):

• .git — git history stays local per machine, GitHub is the source of truth
• .github
• .venv — Python virtual environments
• venv — same, alternate naming
• node_modules — npm packages
• __pycache__ — Python bytecode cache
• tmp
• log
• /Backup

File names excluded (filter type -2):

• ..DS_Store
• ..ds_store
• .tmp

File size excluded (filter type -15):

• Files over 0 bytes — (this may be a default/placeholder)

The filter rules are stored in a SQLite database at:

~/Library/Application Support/SynologyDrive/data/db/filter.sqlite

You can inspect them with:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/SynologyDrive/data/db/filter.sqlite "SELECT * FROM filter_table;"

Because .git is blacklisted, the git history for ~/brain stays local to each machine. Synology Drive handles syncing the working files, and GitHub stores the durable git history. See readme for setup instructions on a new machine.

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