Keep files offline

Everything in the mount is online-only until you open it, and an opened file is cached but evictable. Pinning is the stronger promise: downloaded now, exempt from eviction, and still readable when the server cannot be reached.

wusel pin Documents        # a directory, recursively
wusel pin Notes.txt        # a single file
wusel pin --all            # the whole account — everything it holds, downloaded
wusel pins                 # list what is pinned
wusel unpin Documents      # release it — the files become evictable cache again

Or, in Files: right-click a file or folder and choose Wusel › Make Available Offline; Wusel › Stop Keeping Offline undoes it.

None of these need a running mount — they write straight into the cache. Add --account NAME for a named profile.

A directory pin covers its whole subtree, including entries that have never been listed. A pin also overrides the cache size budget, so a file larger than the budget is still kept.

--all is spelled out on purpose: pinning the whole account downloads everything in it, and it used to be what wusel pin did when the path was left out. A path that resolves to the mount root is refused for the same reason.

Files a directory pin covers but has not fetched yet — the ones the server grew after the pin was made — are shown as promised, not as present: a cloud with a green arrow, and wusel ipc stat reports pinned-pending. wusel update (or Wusel › Update Now in Files) fetches them.

When the server copy changes

A pinned file whose server copy has moved on is marked stale — a green check with a warning — rather than silently updated. Bring it up to date:

wusel update Notes.txt     # one path
wusel update               # every pin in the account

In Files, the same thing is Wusel › Update Now on a stale file.

Use update, not unpin-then-pin-again: the latter drops the eviction marker first, so a re-download that failed would leave the file both outdated and unprotected.

Deciding it in advance

Two settings decide what happens to a stale pin, so you are not chasing them by hand. Both live in config.toml; see Configuration reference.

[sync] refresh_pinned: whether a stale pin is fetched unasked, in the background. manual shows the emblem and nothing else, ask (the default) sends one aggregated notification — it carries no button; you update with wusel update or Wusel › Update Now — auto fetches by itself but only over a connection known to be unmetered.
[sync] open_pinned: what to serve when you open an out-of-date pinned file. newest (the default) fetches the current version, newest-unmetered fetches unless the connection is metered, offline always serves the local copy.

An unknown connection cost counts as metered in both. If you are about to board a train, set open_pinned = "offline" — that is the one setting that makes a pinned file behave the way "kept offline" sounds.

An outdated copy is never handed out silently — you are told, because an application that opens it and saves produces a conflict nobody saw coming.

Where pins live

In ~/.config/wusel/pins.json, beside the configuration and deliberately not in the state database: a pin is what you said, not something Wusel fetched. So wusel cache clear leaves pins alone, they survive a rebuilt or relocated database, and they travel with a roaming home directory. Their contents download again on first use after a clear.