Symlinks are disabled, unsupported or require Administrator privileges

I keep getting the following warning message when starting syncthing on Windows (through Synctrayzor):

Symlinks are disabled, unsupported or require Administrator privileges. This might cause your folder to appear out of sync.

One of the devices is running linux and did have some softlinks which I deleted, but I still keep getting the error message on Windows. As far as I can tell there are not any symlinks on any of the devices, but I keep getting the message which is annoying.

It’s a one off warning which you can ignore. If a symlink is indexed it will most likely pop up every time.

Once it has been deleted, shouldn’t it be removed from the index?

No, it’s just marked as deleted.

Can I rebuild the index? With Synctrayzor on Windows, the warning message needs to be dismissed every time syncthing is started. It’s quite annoying.

You’ll have switch off ALL syncthing instances, and remove the index-0.11 directory from ALL syncthing’s home directory, so that everyone starts with a fresh index.

Could you screenshot it appearing? I don’t typically show any non-fatal Syncthing messages in dialogs, so I’m curious as to what exactly you’re seeing…

Screenshot:

That did it. Thanks!

Aha ok, so it’s a warning message from syncthing, and nothing to do with SyncTrayzor! I wasn’t sure whether I was displaying a dialog I shouldn’t be, or some such. Thanks!

I am having the same problem. I have 3 requests…

  1. Shows the exact path for the symlink with the error message so I know where the symlink is. Currently it doesn’t even tell which shared folder that the symlink exists in.

  2. Make it so that symlinks can be removed from the index (history?) once the symlinks is removed. Having user to find & remove all index across all synced devices is very bad idea… in my opinion.

  3. (optional) I don’t know why symlinks requires Administartor privileges, but make syncthing de-ference the symlink and sync the actual files.

Thanks!

We could show the path, and suppress the warning for deleted symlinks. It’s fairly trivial and probably mostly an oversight that we don’t do that already… Would you mind filing this on GitHub so it’s not lost in the noise?

This looks like a good solution to me.

There is also another issue which would solve this: :wink:

Yep. But this one is simpler as there is no need to worry at all about delete operations for files we don’t have (and can’t have) to start with. (We need to be able to tell other devices about them, but not process them locally, that is.)

I came across the same problem and I am also interested in getting the information about where the Symlinks were found. I checked on GitHub and could not find an issue for the suggested improvement. I just added one: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/1945

This is being mostly addressed in the next release; no complaints about receiving info about deleted symlinks when symlinks can’t be handled, and log output for the affected paths. Should end up in the GUI etc but that’s another issue.

Why not add the user to Users that can create Symlinks in secpol.msc?

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