Syncthing only finds some files on Windows

[ericswpark]

As per title, I’m trying to backup/sync a game across my machines. Explorer reports the folder as having 9.18 GB of content, with 4,885 files and 218 folders.

However, on Syncthing, I get the following:

I’ve tried hitting the rescan button, pausing and unpausing the folder, restarting Syncthing, removing the sync from both devices and re-adding them, etc. None of them have fixed this issue. Why won’t Syncthing discover the other files?

I am running Syncthing 1.28.1 on Windows 11.

[billstewart]

Your question lacks a lot of details. Did you install Syncthing on Windows using an installer, or are you just running the standalone syncthing.exe executable?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

some folder/files are not included in scanning

Hi, This is a strange problem, I have a big folder A (around 100GB, 300k files,69k sub-folders) to sync, however there is small part of subfolders/files in A are not scanned(I manually checked via rest db api) and I didn’t find any error msg in log. however if I add missed subfolder directly as syncthing folder, then it gets scanned without issue. for example, subfolder B under A didn’t get scanned if I add A as syncthing folder; but there is no issue if I add B as the syncthing folder. I am r…

Someone needs to troubleshoot this on Windows…

[ericswpark]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. I assumed Discourse would email me if there was a new reply to the post but I think I may have accidentally disabled all emails when clicking on the unsubscribe button for the weekly roundup email thing that they send out.

I installed Syncthing using the official Windows installer, on both of my Windows machines.

[ericswpark]

@calmh I read through this issue (Dirs/files are missing when scanning on windows after 1.27.12 · Issue #9859 · syncthing/syncthing · GitHub) and the thread you linked, and I’m guessing this is also a problem with NTFS junctions/symlinks.

I’m using a program named BSManager to manage installations of the game. None of the version-specific installation files are shared, but maps are almost always cross-version compatible, so to avoid saving maps multiple times BSManager creates a symlink (NTFS junction I think is what their documentation says but I’m not familiar with how Windows handles it). Essentially the folder structure becomes something like this:

BSInstances/     # Sync target root
  1.28.1/        # Game version 1.28.1
    CustomLevels/ -> /SharedContent/CustomLevels  # Map data (symlink)
    ...          # other 1.28.1 specific folders/files, not symlinked
  1.37.1/        # Game version 1.37.1
    CustomLevels/ -> /SharedContent/CustomLevels  # Map data (symlink)
    ...          # other 1.37.1 specific folders/files, not symlinked
SharedContent/   # Sync target root
  CustomLevels/  # Map data folder

Since I have to “re-symlink” in BSManager after setting up Syncthing and sync on a new machine I don’t really mind if Syncthing just ignores these symlinks/junctions, but it looks like it fails to process them and doesn’t even get to the rest of the files.

[ericswpark]

I’ve managed to fix it by using the ignore pattern to just ignore the symlinked map folders in each instance folder:

*/Beat Saber_Data/CustomLevels

Putting this in something like .stignorejunc and #include .stignorejunc should also work.

I *tentatively* think this issue has been solved for me as Syncthing on both computers now say “Up to Date” with a reasonable-looking number of folders, but will follow up if the sync breaks again.