Syncthing Tutorial: Open Source & Private File Sync Made Simple [YouTube Release]

Chapters
00:00 What is Syncthing?
01:25 Syncthing Use Cases
05:34 How to Install Syncthing on Windows
06:22 How to Install Syncthing on Linux
07:14 Syncthing on Linux with SSH Tunneling
09:24 Setting up Devices and Shares in Syncthing
16:06 Dealing with File Conflicts
17:50 Syncthing File Versioning
19:50 Connecting Devices Without The Discovery Server
22:17 Untrusted Encrypted Syncthing Devices
27:20 How I am using Syncthing

thomasdc · June 10, 2025, 11:48am

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a bit of a head-scratcher with permissions on my TrueNAS server, specifically with Syncthing and SMB shares. I’m hoping someone here might have some insight!

Here’s my setup:

**TrueNAS Version:TrueNAS SCALE 24.10.2.2)
**Syncthing Installation: I’ve installed Syncthing as an official TrueNAS application(user id and group: 568 (apps) .
**Dataset: My Syncthing app is linked to a dedicated dataset at /pool/syncthing
SMB Share: I’ve also set up an SMB share pointing to this exact same pool/syncthing folder so I can access it from my Windows PC.

The problem I’m facing is with permissions on new files and folders created by Syncthing:

When I manually create files or folders inside pool/syncthing via the SMB share from Windows, I have full read/write access without any issues.
However, when Syncthing ‘creates’ new folders or files within pool/syncthing (for example, pool/syncthing/new_synced_folder), I lose edit rights to them when accessing via SMB.
If I try to delete or modify a file inside one of these Syncthing-created folders, I get an error like: “You require permission from Unix User\apps to make changes to this file.”

It seems like the new items created by the Syncthing application aren’t inheriting the correct permissions for my SMB user, even though the parent folder seems fine. I was hoping all child folders and files would automatically have the same SMB rights as the pool/syncthing parent.

I guess i will have to make come changes in the permissons of thet ‘pool/syncthing’ dataset?
I am a total ACL noob…

Any guidance or steps would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance

thomasdc · June 13, 2025, 12:22pm

I tried a lot of things allready..

my dataset is now set as unix permissions 7/7/7

but i notice when a file is created by syncthing on the truenas
(file is created on windows, and syncting then creates it on the truenas)

when i go look at that file created by syncthing (i am not able to modify it)
i see this:

so i gues, even so the dataset has 7/7/7 permisions, files created by truenas don’t get those permissions.
I don’t know how to fix this..

extra information:
when configurating the Syncthing app in truenas I set the user and group as ‘apps’ (568)
then I see this:

and when I want to run the app with user en group id ‘0’ it does not want to start..

thomasdc · June 13, 2025, 7:31pm

an little update:

here you can see 2 files on the Truenas server

the first one was created by browsing on windows (smb) to the location and create the file.
(smb user is ‘Thomas’)
the other one was created by syncthing

files

So i gues i have to set somewhere that everyone has rw rights to the file?
(smb on the datasets will handlle who has access to the files? )

thomasdc · June 16, 2025, 3:34pm

i found the sollution:

in the syncthing web interface:
Settings → advanced → Folders → select your folder → select Ignore Perms