What is the purpose of "Periodically sync media"?

Anki Development
1

Backstory

I opened an issue in the repo for ankis manual because the preference “Periodically sync media” isn’t documented:

I also found a speculation from Danika_Dakika, which I also linked in the above issue. I did some digging today (see linked issue) and based on the code, it seems to be that that setting triggers a media sync every 15 minutes.

Question

I’d like to know and document why that option is needed. A normal sync without that option turned on does sync media anyways, so why is this needed?

I could only see one scenario, but this seems like a weird scenario to me (I mean, a normal sync would suffice, no?):

  • User has device A and adds media.
  • User syncs media from device A to AnkiWeb.
  • User has device B open (with “Periodically sync media” enabled).
  • Device B downloads the media automatically every 15 minutes (but obviously without stuff like review history)

Maybe the purpose is to prevent a large media download on normal syncs, perhaps for users with slower internet?

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I did some more digging and am now wondering whether “Periodically sync media” only exists for historical purposes and isn’t needed anymore.

To me, it seems like this option had been solving a problem which doesn’t exist anymore ever since Refactor media sync handling by dae · Pull Request #2647 · ankitects/anki · GitHub has been merged by dae.

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For me, this is still a valid use case for this option.

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Right. I have created a PR:

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