as you can see I tried to throw everything at it, but it’s still trying to access obb.
Two questions: is my sync failing because of this? Doesn’t look like it, but I just want to be sure…
What’s the effect of this error? Is it just a warning, and can be ignored?
If you have any non-trivial include patters (starting with !, having any wildcards, path separators or not rooted/starting with a /) the file watcher needs to watch the entire folder → you’ll see those errors.
Also, it seems that you’re trying to sync the entire /sdcard partition on Android. This is usually not a good idea, because there’re many restricted and/or unneeded folders there. It also seems that you only want to sync four actual folders, so what I’d suggest is to simply add them all to Syncthing separately.
dang. thanks, y’all. I was kinda hoping to make a generic .stignore for all my household’s devices and have a single folder to sync to per device, instead of four.
No, Syncthing will sync the excluded folders despite the error. However, the error itself will persist. I’d still suggest using four folders, but if you really want to have just one, the actual ignore patterns that you probably need are
It is fairly all or nothing. If the watcher can’t watch the folder we need to scan. We could fall back to some sort of “watcher plus frequent scans” mode, but that’s not what we do.
They say “exclude”, but they really seem to mean “ignore”. For example, if you wanted to sync the whole /sdcard partition, then you could add /Android to the ignore patterns to get rid of the error.
In your case, the problem is that you’re trying ignore everything with * and then exclude a few folders with ! at the same time, which causes the file watcher to stop working due to the permission errors. The only solutions seem to be a) adding each of the four folders to Syncthing separately, b) not using any ! exclusions, e.g. by ignoring all unneeded stuff by their name instead of using *, or c) running Syncthing as root.