Help needed running syncthing in the background on macOS

I need help running syncthing in the background on macOS. I have the standard binary installed. The folder with it in home looks like this:

ls syncthing-mac-os-arm64-v.1.27.9
AUTHORS.txt   LICENSE.txt   README.txt    etc           syncthing     syncthing.old
❯ ls syncthing-mac-os-arm64-v.1.27.9/etc
README.md     freebsd-rc    linux-runit   linux-systemd macos-launchd
firewall-ufw  linux-desktop linux-sysctl  linux-upstart solaris-smf

I don’t know what to do with syncthing.old. I recall installing syncthing twice, so perhaps that’s the first and obsolete instance, and it would be safe to delete in that case?

In the directory on GitHub, it says:

Install the syncthing binary in a directory called bin in your home directory.

This may suggest syncthing is not properly installed, or that all the files except the binary are not needed, and I should simply move the current binary to the ~/bin folder and delete rest of the files? By the way, why not /bin? I don’t have a bin directory in home and all my binaries are in root.

Typically I’d just suggest moving the current binary to ~/bin, yes. Not using /bin is because Syncthing needs write access to the binary in order to do automatic upgrades. The syncthing.old file is the result of such an upgrade – the previous version is kept around to be able to rollback the upgrade.

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So since syncthing binary needs syncthing and syncthing.old, shouldn’t I just move the entire directory as it is into bin? I want to ensure I’m following best practices.

On a side note, where is the data stored?

I think of moving syncthing to docker, but would like to move all the data from my local machine to docker so I don’t have to set up all the directories manually again.

What would you recommend in my case, as per my last comment.

I recommend moving the binary to ~/bin. The index data is stored in ~/Application Support/Syncthing.

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I don’t have this directory on my machine at all, so they must be stored elsewhere? 14.6.1 (23G93)

Sorry, ~/Library/Application Support/Syncthing. Syncthing Configuration — Syncthing documentation

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