I have syncthing installed on my TrueNAS server with several other machine connected to it. The only one having issues is my wife’s Windows 11 Pro machine. 656 files are reported to have an illegal character in the name (“:”) which auto-normalization is supposed to take care of. Search results are from years ago when auto-normalization did not exist.
The filenames shows are /path/to/folder/thumbs.db:encryptable which is not in the filename. Any clues as to what is going on?
Do you mean https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-autonormalize? If yes, then I’d say this is not what you think it is. At the moment, there is no way to automatically resolve “illegal” filename problems in Syncthing. In other words, the only method to sync those files to a Windows device is to remove : from their names.
Except that the filename is thumbs.db and not thumbs.db:encryptable. None of the filenames claimed to be in violation exist on either machine. I do not know why syncthing is hallucinating these names.
I even deleted one of the thumbs.db files in question, and syncthing still reports the error.
Please check https://superuser.com/questions/357342/how-to-delete-a-thumbs-dbencryptable-file. It appears that one of your systems has added NTFS alternate data streams to the files, and at least from my experience, this can lead to issues in Windows (e.g. Windows backup cannot properly process those).
As a “simple” solution, I’d suggest to just delete all thumbs.db in the synced folders under Windows. After doing so, also add thumbs.db to your ignore patterns in Syncthing. There is no valid reason to those files anyway.