Greetings. I have the latest syncthing running on Ubuntu 20.04 and synched to several other machines. It synched everything great, although once it seemed to delete a file in folder, and would say it was out of synch until I renamed the folder in question, and delete the previous folder name on the other machines.
However, one day later, and all the files are gone on all machines. There was no folder marker issue, nothing, just everything was gone. No files or folders in the shared directory were changed in any way.
Can’t figure what is going on here, though I saw the two other topics of mass deletion, and seems no cause cited there.
The first thing that happens is that the system rejects a normal folder, one of many, in the directory and deletes the file that is inside. That makes the shared directory “out of sync”. It replicates the directory on all the other machines, and then they all become out of sync.
I restore the deleted file (a pdf), into a New directory, and delete the old ones. Then the main shared server will go into sync, but I have to manually go to all the other machines to remove the old folder and delete the file inside- which was not deleted on the other servers.
Then, in a couple of hours, it deletes every last piece of data in the shared folder on all the machines.
I will try to send screenshots but they are mostly headless nodes and phones (not this laptop i am typing on), but they don’t really have any pertinent information. The ‘last activity’ just shows that they have deleted the valid data sitting in the shared folder.
devices may or may not say synched.
all are synching to one and only one folder on one computer.
no other sharing or synching.
one device (shown in terminal) says it can’t synch.
all show 99% or whatever and can’t finally sync.
main system (goloka) is showing this from terminal (referencing the file and folder it deleted on its own) →
[JTHJ7] 09:37:10 INFO: Puller (folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m), item “Food For Life Georgia, Inc.”): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[JTHJ7] 09:37:10 INFO: “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m): Failed to sync 1 items
[JTHJ7] 09:37:10 INFO: Folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m) isn’t making sync progress - retrying in 1m0s.
[JTHJ7] 09:37:51 INFO: Puller (folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m), item “Food For Life Georgia, Inc.”): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[JTHJ7] 09:37:51 INFO: “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m): Failed to sync 1 items
[JTHJ7] 09:37:51 INFO: Folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m) isn’t making sync progress - retrying in 2m0s.
[JTHJ7] 09:37:54 INFO: Puller (folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m), item “Food For Life Georgia, Inc.”): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[JTHJ7] 09:37:54 INFO: “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m): Failed to sync 1 items
[JTHJ7] 09:37:54 INFO: Folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m) isn’t making sync progress - retrying in 2m0s.
[JTHJ7] 09:37:56 INFO: Puller (folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m), item “Food For Life Georgia, Inc.”): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[JTHJ7] 09:37:56 INFO: “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m): Failed to sync 1 items
[JTHJ7] 09:37:56 INFO: Folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m) isn’t making sync progress - retrying in 2m0s.
[JTHJ7] 09:38:10 INFO: Puller (folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m), item “Food For Life Georgia, Inc.”): syncing: delete dir: directory has been deleted on a remote device but is not empty; the contents are probably ignored on that remote device, but not locally
[JTHJ7] 09:38:10 INFO: “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m): Failed to sync 1 items
[JTHJ7] 09:38:10 INFO: Folder “Gdrive” (l9kcq-nm95m) isn’t making sync progress - retrying in 2m0s.
There doesn’t seem to be anything obvious in the screenshots and logs (at least in my eyes), but I can think of these three points/questions:
Are all versions of Syncthing involved current or at least recent?
The file/folder listed several times is Food For Life Georgia, Inc.. The final dot is normally a problem for operating systems like Windows, and I’m not sure how Android, especially if its FAT filesystem is involved, reacts to that. You may want to try to remove the final dot and see what happens then.
The folder in Syncthing is called Gdrive. Does this mean that you use Google Drive to sync the exact same path? There may be various issues if two synchronisation programs operate on the same path at the same time. This is likely an untested territory though.
They are all the latest version.
There is one on the Huawei that I think was called Syncthing Fork.
OK, I will try removing the dot.
I zip’ped my Google Drive into this and called it Gdrive, so thankfully I have a backup.
I am not sure which filesystem you use, but if Wikipedia is to be trusted, the comma in the filename might be an issue as well, as long as you use a fat12 fat16 or fat32 filesystem. This can happen if you store the files on an external SD-card.
Reserved characters:
“0x00-0x1F 0x7F " * / : < > ? \ | + , . ; = [ ] (in some environments also: ! @; DOS 1/2 did not allow 0xE5 as first character)”
When you say you delete the old ones, that might explain why the main server will start to sync and the next day all the folders are empty or gone? Syncthing is linked to folders via their (hidden) Folder-ID. When you restore the file (the pdf) into a new folder, then this new folder will have a new folder-ID and hence not be detected by Syncthing. I guess? So if you delete the old folder, then syncthing will detect the change (=the deletion) and sync that to all the other devices.
One more question: The file that is out of sync, is it always the same one or is it a random file?
When I got rid of the trailing “.”, that problem went away.
Things seem to be OK now.
To clarify, it was not just this folder with the “.” that was deleted, it was the entire folder share of many files and folders that was completely deleted.
