I am not here to disparage Syncthing developers and support group. On the contrary, I am still very impressed with ST process. I am here to tell my story if it helps. Please don’t read this and feel badly about your work.
TLDR: I tried SyncThing, but I settled on rsync.
I came to Syncthing on recommendation of Steve Gibson’s recent podcast on TWIT Security Now about his quest for synchronization. I setup ST syncs for my laptop and TV computer basic folders and one to sync my Music folder from the TV computer to the old Synology (DS212j).
I had some limited experience with rsync and luckyBackup, both of which were negative.
My Music folder changes only occasionally as I add new CDs to my collection. I rip them to the TV computer and then ST them over to the Synology. They are simply folders with FLAC, MP3, and graphic files. I use Subsonic to serve music from the Syno with DSub on my phone and a web browser on the TV. I use Airsonic on the TV computer in hopes that it might someday address the shortcomings of Subsonic.
ST never seems to be able to sync the Music folders, whether they are one-way and esp. if they are bi-directional. There are always a handful of folders that won’t sync. Even the home folder syncs on my laptop always had issues with unsyncable folders or folders that changed too often and I had to put ignores on. (I wish Mozilla would address the issue of directories for backup versus directories for holding ephemeral state, but they have their own defective sync product that I now use instead of ST.) ST slows the old Syno to a crawl making it impossible to use the Subsonic server.
So I spent a few more days studying and experimenting with rsync and I finally understand enough to make it work for my Music folder. It is a marvel of speed and efficiency with only two lines of script to do a dry-run followed by an actual. Anything goes wrong, there is understandable output to diagnose. I can set permissions how I please, but I can’t yet do any ignores or matching, but I don’t need that complexity. I don’t do deletes. It’s safe and easy to understand.
Thanks for listening.
Why do you say “syncthing is not what you wanted”? I feel that we should listen carefully to people who bring different opinions, as they bring valuable insight into what syncthing is not doing today…
There are plenty of things syncthing is not, and I think there is value to having a specialized tool rather than “and a kitchen sink” tool that does everything but it’s all half-working. It’s pretty hard to keep the existing feature set afloat.
For example we might feel the need to wedge sync-once-then-remove-device stuff because that what syncthing currently isn’t, but rsync would have been the better tool for that in the first place.
I can only see a single post from the OP asking questions and trying to solve his issues, which I think we did our best to answer and help with.
We can’t win every battle, and if there are tools that make the problem more simple or understandable, I think it’s probably the right decision to use those tools.
This specific topic does not cover technicalities and I think it’s ok, as it’s a statement of experience oppose to an attempt to debug things.
We should just accept that and and fight the fights that are still on-going. Asking users to debug issues once they are no longer using syncthing is a waste of everyones time.
Well, and to me it seemed what OP really wanted was a fast command-line folder-to-folder sync with a single dataset.
Syncthing could easily work for this, but it seems like it might be a bit of overkill, and if OP is having better luck with a simple script to copy over all the files to their final data dump, then this might be the one case where simplicity is to be preferred.
Well, that and the preference of the end-user.
That said, I, personally am using Syncthing a LOT more comprehensively in a larger organization and it’s everything I ever dreamed of.
I have also seen something like this and I also agree that it is a little bit less of informations. When dealing with Syncthing and Synology, there are a few simple rules, to which there are also enough contributions, including mine.
I recently had 4, now 3 Synology DS with Syncthing installed. With the latest Syncthing v1.4.2 it runs flawlessly and everything is synchronized. I do some cross-checks from time to time, so I’m sure.
To get further, some information are needed. Whether you use the SynoCommunity package or the Syncthing package that has been available since January:
as there described in the documentation, it must be ensured in any case that the rights have been granted.
In addition, on Synology side the individual peers under Edit > Advanced > Permissions Ignore must be activated (checkmark), otherwise the described effects can occur.
Then the to be synchronized scope would be very important, since the RAM memory with 256 MB in the DS212j limits the matter quite quickly. This could also be one of the reasons why it is not working properly.
