I’ve previously used Syncthing to sync the folder where iTunes stores iPhone backups in macOS (~/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup) between my computers, but I’ve just noticed that this doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
If I add that folder to Syncthing, Syncthing thinks it’s empty after it does its initial scan - it just shows up as containing 0 files etc.
This is on Mojave (10.14.2) so I’m thinking it’s probably to do with the extra security stuff around file system access that was added, but I have Syncthing (both the syncthing-macos application and the actual Syncthing executable) authorised for Full Disk Access, but I’m still having the problem.
Yeah there’s something special going on here. That directory is protected, and adding the Syncthing binary to “full disk access” and having it started by launchd doesn’t work for me either. If I grant my terminal full disk access and launch it manually from there, it works. Maybe it’s not possible to grant access to something that’s not an app bundle? I know the app signing stuff doesn’t like launching CLI tools from the GUI. Warrants further investigation.
You could give syncthing-macos a spin and see if that works better when granted full disk access.
Syncthing version is 1.0.0, syncthing-macos version is 1.0.0-2 (didn’t make it clear in my original post but I’m using syncthing-macos rather than just the command line version)
I originally added syncthing-macos to Full Disk Access a while back when it was version 0.14.52-1, but the app recently updated to 1.0.0-2, so I removed & re-added to Full Disk Access, but that made no difference.
Yeah it looks like the permission in question can only be granted to app bundles and doesn’t affect anything not in /Applications. Unfortunately it won’t work with either the “raw” Syncthing nor Syncthing-macOS at the moment as far as I can tell.
I just tried this again and for some reason it’s working again now on my system. Might be related to the 10.14.3 update that came out, or it could be some kind of user error on my part as well, but that folder is now syncing normally on my machines as far as I can tell.