Corrupted data in shared folders

Having run Syncthing successfully for a while, I have encountered problem - some of my data has become corrupted in my shared folders, and they are now inconsistent on 2 machines, despite showing as “up to date”.

I will consider one of the shared folders to make it simpler:

  • Two PCs are syncing this folder
  • Rescan Interval: 3600s, File Pull Order: Smallest First, File Versioning: Staggered File Versioning
  • Both PCs report in syncthing the same stats: 1832 items, ~114 GiB
  • However, PC 1 reports in explorer: 127GB, 1,627 files, 222 folders
  • PC 2 reports in explorer: 114GB, 1,620 files, 217 folders

Some examples of the inconsistent & corrupt data:

  • On PC 1, file 1 (“Keys/MSDN_keys.xlsx”) is missing (it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the shared folder). On PC 2, it shows in explorer (including properties like file size, date modified etc), but when I try to open it in any application it says the file doesn’t exist.
  • On PC 1, a whole folder is missing (“OS/Windows/Taken from Windows upgrade installer”). On PC 2, when I try to open the folder, explorer says “*** is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.”

These 2 PCs have been on and off a lot over the last few weeks - probably they weren’t on at the same time for a while, with a lot of changes made on both PCs. Is Syncthing able to cope with this sort of scenario?

It’s possible even that files Syncthing was already trying to be synced were being moved around as well…

So you are hitting some sort of bug in Windows (I’ve been hit by it multiple times), hence we can’t really predict what syncthing will do in such scenario.

I suggest you restart both PCs, and fix the access/existance issues before starting syncthing.

can you link or explain the bug a bit more. Losing data in a syncing scenario is kind of scary.

It just prevents you from accessing certain files/directories until you reboot. It’s not syncthings fault, it’s Windows fault.

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