FAQ suggestions for Troubleshooting section

Feature
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I’ve just spent a bit of time exploring Syncthing, and finding it really useful. There were a few files that gave me a bit of trouble - a line or two in the FAQ would have been a big help…

  1. Filename case handling differences: Windows cannot tell the difference between a file named “Foo” and one named “foo”, but Linux can have two different filenames. This will show on the Windows side as a “Failed item”, but Linux will only show it as Out of sync. Maybe a good feature would be a test on the sending side, at the time of enabling the share.

  2. Other filename problems: Some characters are possible in some operating systems, but not in others. A simple script could find and signal problem filenames. Unfortunately I fixed this problem without noting the details, so I cannot give the exact characters.

  3. Antivirus problems: Windows Defender and other antivirus programs may delete files immediately after Syncthing has transferred them, but before they are saved (I think). Of course, this may be a good thing if there is really a virus, but I found that .eml files were not syncing, giving Syncthing log messages about not “making sync progress”. (See also this report). I think maybe the “making sync progress” message is hiding an error like: “I saved the file but it failed/wasn’t there/disappeared”. Setting an exception in the antivirus program seems to resolve this. I suspect there may be other filenames which get special attention from antivirus programs: for example, I haven’t yet tried a .sys file; there can be problems with zip files containing ‘forbidden’ filenames.

Anyway, I think it would be useful to have a note in the FAQ for all 3 of these. Maybe some of them could suggest new features, but I don’t think they are really bugs.

Now, the real question: Does anyone else have any stories of finding and fixing problems with syncing ? Problems I might get syncing between windows and linux ?

I have a very nice feeling that Syncthing is really going to make my life a lot easier !

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I think the first and second points are well known. It’s a little surprising there isn’t something in the FAQ about them already :wink:.

As for the antivirus, from what I remember, you should actually be presented with information about the file being blocked by the AV. Can you post a screenshot with the specific error that you’ve encountered?

Case sensitivity and unsupported characters are the two big issues that you’ve already mentioned. Some other problems that I’ve seen on the forum quite often are file permissions and filename/path length limitations which differ significantly depending on the OS and/or filesystem in use. Character encoding is possibly yet another issue if you use something else than the regular Unicode.

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Thank you Tomasz! I will try to reproduce the problem and keep some detailed notes of identifying and fixing it. Charlie