Syncthing on umbrel, unable to create sync directory

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hey all,

I’m running into a frustrating issue trying to set up Syncthing on my Umbrel. I’m trying to sync a folder from my Mac to my Umbrel, but the remote folder on the Umbrel side fails to initialize with the following error:

2025-09-08 19:18:32: Failed to create folder root directory (folder.label=Downloads folder.id=uksjq-ec4in folder.type=sendreceive error=“mkdir /Apps: permission denied” log.pkg=model)

2025-09-08 19:18:32: Failed initial scan (error=“folder path missing” folder.label=Downloads folder.id=uksjq-ec4in folder.type=sendreceive log.pkg=model)

Here’s what I’ve tried:

My setup

  • Syncthing version: 2.3

  • Umbrel user: umbrel

  • Syncthing process user: Confirmed with ps aux | grep syncthing, it’s running as umbrel

  • Target folder on Umbrel: /home/umbrel/umbrel/home/Downloads

Permissions are OK
drwxr-xr-x 2 umbrel umbrel 4096

any help is appreciated

2

Hi @fbrichs, I don’t use Syncthing on my Umbrel, but I think Syncthing is unable to find your target directory /home/umbrel/umbrel/home/Downloads because it is running inside a Docker container. Therefore, Syncthing will only have access to the volume defined by the associated docker-compose.yml file.

This file defines the single volume ${APP_DATA_DIR}/data:/var/syncthing. Therefore, if you define your paths in Syncthing to have root /var/syncthing then the files should get written on your host at ${APP_DATA_DIR}/data (I think this would be/home/umbrel/umbrel/app-data/syncthing/data)

3

Thanks I was able to fix it using the full suggested path /var/syncthing/MYDIR

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