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# Rules Overview [Standard/Professional Only]

Sometimes particular conditions about a file should change the way Synk handles it. For instance, you may wish that Synk skips over files with a particular label, always deletes files with some name, or doesn't archive large files.

Synk Standard allows using rules to exclude certain files and folders from the operation. Synk Professional additionally allows rules to determine specific actions to be taken for files and folders, the joining of rule criteria in boolean combinations, and using rules to govern whether items are archived upon their deletion.

The "Edit Rule" sheet appears when you either create a new rule by clicking on the "Add" button to create a new rule or when you click the "Edit" button to change an existing rule.

Use the "Name" field to help you remember what the rule does. This has no impact on the behavior of the rule, but is how the rule is shown in the main rule list.

There are four main inputs that determine the overall behavior of the rule:

- The first menu in the edit pane determines what action is taken if the rule matches. Most of the time, you will want to use the exclude option as all items are included by default. However, if there are a few exceptions to a general exclusion rule, you can create a higher-priority rule with "Stop Evaluating Rules" as its action, so that those exceptions will be included.
- In Synk Standard, you can control whether all criteria must match or whether just one is sufficient by choosing the appropriate option from the second menu. The same option is available through changing the top level boolean combination in Synk Professional.
- The final menu determines whether each criterion must match all versions of the item (in each source folder), or just one.
- Finally, the criteria you define most fundamentally determine whether the rule "matches" an item or not. The criterion definition interface should be familiar to most users from other applications like the Finder and Mail. The first drop down controls which attribute of the item is tested, such as the filename, date created or modified, the label, or others. Click here for more information on criterion attributes. The remainder of the criterion view allows you to choose how the item's criterion should match.

Due to a bug in the Cocoa frameworks, international users should be careful with the date parsing in the date rules. Some localized date formats will not be properly read by the text field; however, the displayed date will be properly in your localized format.

## See also

Rules