2026/05/15
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Friday, May 15, 2026 (#135)
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SyncThing Shenanigans
I was going to give a quick version of this story, but why not spin out the whole thing?
The Setup
- I was running out of drive space on SamEagle.
- Among the items inherited from Harena's mom was one (1) Seagate external drive, 2 TB capacity.
- I thought "Aha, I can use that! If it's too full, I'll just archive what's on it (again, just to be safe) onto a large drive elsewhere".
- ...but apparently since the last time I had used it, I had misplaced the power adapter.
- I went on Ebay looking for an adapter, but found another drive of the exact same model except 8 TB, for ~$150 -- which, in the current era of AI-inflated drive prices, seemed like a pretty good deal, so I bought it.
- It arrived last week -- but it didn't work. The drive powered up and responded as if it was working, but neither SamEagle nor SamMachine could see a drive (even in the Disks utility).
- The power-adapter works fine, however, so I used it to do that extra backup of the 2 TB drive.
- I took the 8 TB drive out of the external enclosure and put it in a hot-pluggable USB drive -- and it worked. So it's not the drive, the power-supply, or the cable that are at fault. (Presumably it's the USB electronics in the case.)
- I then did the following:
- used FTM to copy a bunch of stuff off SamEagle's internal secondary drive over to the 8TB
- stopped SyncThing
- deleted and re-created the link that SyncThing was sharing from -- it used to point to the internal drive, now it points to the 8TB external
- re-started SyncThing.
- All seems well. I had FTM recheck the old-to-new copy again just to make sure nothing was missing (at the small risk of adding some duplicates).
The Problem
- Today I'm looking for some audio and video work I did a couple of weeks ago, and the folders are empty.
- I found that the files are still present on SamEagle's new copy of the folder.
- You know -- the one that is supposedly being kept in sync by SyncThing.
...so now I'm frantically FTMing those files directly from SamEagle over to SamMachine, because I want to make sure they don't get lost. I do not understand what happened, but I can only suspect that SyncThing was somehow involved. It might also, however, be FTM not copying things completely on the first run-through, but I don't know why it would forget some items on one run but not on following runs.
I also ended up with an extra copy of the stuff on the 8TB, so maybe I just got confused somewhere along the way?
In any case, both FTM and SyncThing need usable action-logs so I can figure out what happened when this kind of thing occurs. Something similar happened with NextCloud, at least once -- it randomly started just deleting files from the repo, and they'd have been gone if I hadn't stopped it while there were still unaffected copies on some machines. I still don't know what caused that, and I don't remember how I fixed it. Point is, though: apps that do file-sync ops need to keep a log.
FTM does actually create a log, but it's not as usable as it should be. (I'm still using the old version, mind you, and can't really tinker with it; I will make sure the new version does have something usable.)
FTM update
Mostly what I've been working on for the last couple of days is a rework/tidying of the Narcissa system, because I've been using properties (instead of functions) a lot more, which means I need to be able to see them in the report.
In the process, I've realized that I really should be using the more complete/advanced version of the system -- but before switching over, I wanted to tidy up how everything was organized just to make sure nothing gets newly tangled-up when I do that.
New to-do items (once basic functionality is working):
- logging system
- resume-from function
- should automatically save a bookmark once a second or so, if the current file has changed