Writing to SD Card issue

[MaximilianPreisinger]

Hi there! I would like to use Syncthing for Downloading pictures from the Phone to the PC, and to upload other files like music to the SD Card of the Phone in a convenient way (i.e. without removing the SD Card from my phone every time).

I recently heard about Syncthing and thought that’s exactly the thing I need. However, when I select any folder on my SD Card, I can only select the folder type as “send only”. When I click on it, it says: “Your Android version only grants Syncthing readonly access to the selected folder.” However, when I select a folder not on the external SD Card but on my device memory, it works and I can set it to “Send & Receive”. But my device memory is very limited, I really need to upload stuff to my SD Card.

Can somebody help me figuring out the problem? Am I using it wrongly, did I oversee something? Is it a bug which will be fixed? Or is the problem known and accepted? If so, is there a way to fix it in the syncthing source code?

I tried Syncthing-Fork in Version 0.14.51.7 and Syncthing in Version 0.10.14 both from F-Droid, and both show the same behavior. My Android version is 7.0 and I am using a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.

I really would appreciate some help, since I also did find nothing on the internet concerning this problem. I’ve seen this post where the problem is shortly mentioned in the discussion

Syncthing-Android Unofficial Beta

Hi together, as a consequence of the discussion in topic ( Folder creation broken in Android app ) and recurring questions on the github issue tracker why things that have been fixed by commit are still broken in the release version, I’d like to offer help for people that don’t mind installing a beta build on their phone. I understood that @AudriusButkevicius doesn’t have the time to build releases and beta’s repeatedly. Currently, a lot of development is going on regarding Syncthing Android an…

but this was not very informative and thus not a big help for me.

[AudriusButkevicius]

Read the android faq, search the forums for the same question, this has been answered already plenty of times.

There is no way to sync to an sd card.

[Catfriend1]

You CAN sync to sdcard but you need to use a special path to do it without using a rooted phone.

[Guz]

…you need to use a special path…

Do you think you could elaborate that statement? A link to the information or a detailed explanation, perhaps.

Best regards

Guz

[Catfriend1]

See https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-android/issues/29 for a very detailed explanation why it happens and what can be done to workaround.

[MaximilianPreisinger]

Thanks for your replys and advice (especially for Catfriends link)! After some research, unfortunately it seems like what I want is not possible. Unless I root my phone and grant Syncthing root access on my Samsung Galaxy. Not sure if I am doing this, at the moment I cleaned up my device storage and use this as transfer storage. Maybe I will also use Catfriends workaround when I am running out of storage.

But still, I find it very disturbing that android uses this old FAT filesystem which introduces all these troubles… It would be way more convenient to define the SD Card as mount-able ext3 filesystem (for me as unix user this would not introduce any trouble at all…). But on the Galaxy S7 it is not even possible to mount the SD Card as internal storage at all

So far, thanks for all the fish