.stfolder: permission denied

[fongaboo]

Syncing drives on two Mac workstations. One of our four shares gets this error:

2017-02-10 16:59:39: Creating folder marker: open /Volumes/Data\ Backup/.stfolder: permission denied

2017-02-10 16:59:43: Stopping folder “hztdu-e2ofk” - folder marker missing

The drive in question is named ‘Data Backup’, hence the \ escape of the space.

Here are the permissions on one machine:

-rw-r–r-- 1 admin 0 Nov 28 10:44 .stfolder

However on the other machine (the one that displays the error), it originally showed -rw-------. I chmod’ed it 644 and restarted, but the error still persisted.

Then I deleted it and restarted, in hopes it would generate a new one. No dice.

But here’s the weird thing. When I listed the directory /Volumes/ (where OS X locates its device mounts), in addition to the other drives I saw this:

drwx—rwx+ 30 \Domain Users 1088 Feb 10 16:50 Data Backup drwx------+ 2 admin 68 Feb 10 16:11 Data\ Backup

If you notice. It’s creating an empty folder with a literal backslash character in the name. I confirmed this by killing Synching, deleting the directory from /Volumes/, then restarting… and it creates that erroneous empty directory again!

Even weirder is that it’s only happening on the one machine, but not the other… And they are fairly identical workstations.

Why would Syncthing be having such problems dealing with volumes with spaces in its label… And on only one machine no less!

[imsodin (Simon)]

Do you manually add backslash escapes for spaces in your paths in the syncthing UI? If so don’t, there is no need.

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

Indeed. The backslash is just a character like any other here, so Data\ Backup is a perfectly valid directory name that it will try to create if it does not exist. And there is probably magic happening in /Volumes with permissions and whatnot.

[fongaboo]

Simon was correct. On one machine, when I created the shares, I entered the path without backslashes and on the other I put backslashes before spaces. This was the result apparently.