[HN Gopher] Syncthing: Open-Source Continuous File Sync with Pri...
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Syncthing: Open-Source Continuous File Sync with Privacy in Mind
Author : EchoForge
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-09-29 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Since I started using Syncthing, I have found many cases of "just
| make a new folder and share it with selection of other devices"
| and now, that I am running it on a server, it is also always
| online, ready to share with any device that comes online. It is
| just so neat and handy!
| kristjank wrote:
| SyncThing has been the only piece of open-source software which
| I've fire-and-forget installed and it's working indefinitely.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Seconding the sentiment <3
| yownie wrote:
| I've had the intention of testing it out for YEARS and
| finally got around to it last week or so. Really pleasantly
| surprised how well the NAT punching / relay servers handle
| keeping machines synced.
|
| I wish I had tried it all those years ago. I wish excluding
| directories was a little more intuitive and there was a good
| way to administer config's on a machine not local to me.
| Maybe over SSH, I'm still learning.
| edarchis wrote:
| I use it on so many platforms and even sometimes in three-way
| like my Obsidian vault that syncs between my laptop, my phone
| and my tablet. I barely ever had any conflict. Amazing
| software.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Yep, good software and the dev (nutomic) is the main Lemmy
| coder, meaning the fediverse is in good hands.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I had to stop using it after loads of conflict files piled up
| over the years in my notes folder.
|
| I'm trying to switch to WebDAV for notes. Considering
| Caddy+WebDAV[0] or Peergos[1] or SeaweedFS[2], but not
| Next/OwnCloud.
|
| Is still consider using Syncthing for other files types.
|
| [0] https://whhone.com/posts/webdav-syncthing/
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/search?q=repo%3APeergos%2FPeergos%20webda...
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/blob/master/weed/comm...
| Filligree wrote:
| I've had to reset it multiple times due to the same sort of
| issue. There doesn't seem to be a good way to resolve
| conflicts; at least, none that reliably works.
| generalizations wrote:
| You have to ensure there's continuity - at least something
| online and connected at all times, to ensure that the system
| can know and have distributed the latest version of the
| files.
|
| I just have it running on my desktop, and at this point, the
| system's been running for nearly 6 years, and the file
| conflicts are rare. They only happen when I e.g. do edits on
| my laptop offline, then go home and do more edits on my
| desktop before letting my laptop sync.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Conflict files are good. It means you changed the same file in
| multiple locations and Syncthing didn't overwrite or delete any
| of them.
|
| Much like forest fires, only you can prevent conflict files.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Nah. They're not alone. For me, syncthing would just randomly
| decide an updated file conflicted; I had two computers and a
| smartphone and was pretty careful about this stuff.
|
| It was its only fault - but it was easier to figure out what
| the actual most-current file was.
|
| Nextcloud does the same thing occasionally, and it's not
| intuitive at all trying to figure out which one is the proper
| one to keep.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I had to stop using it after loads of conflict files piled up
| over the years in my notes folder.
|
| SyncThing is still still _loads_ better than Next/Own-Cloud
| unless you also need the extra baggage those two bring.
|
| Having said that, "conflict-sync" files are my current issue.
|
| I have several devices that sync to a local central device and
| a remote central device and I'm struggling to determine if the
| "conflicts" that are _not_ conflicts are because of this "dual-
| honed" approach or not.
| soupbowl wrote:
| I had similar issues years ago and it was frustrating. What I
| do now is have syncthing on a 'server' that is always on and
| everything syncs to the server and not between each device.
| That reduced my conflicts by 99%. Another issue I had was
| accidentally deleting a folder and having it deleted off of all
| my devices.
|
| To solve that issue I have my server do ZFS snapshots on my
| syncthing folder, which makes for easy recovery. With those 2
| things being done, I can't say enough good things about
| syncthing. Compared to nextcloud it is almost maintenance free.
| EGreg wrote:
| Why not just use rsync -a periodically over an encrypted ssh
| connection? It works across Mac/Linux etc. and is just as
| efficient, no?
|
| If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script to
| watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it
| happene.
| dmd wrote:
| You can already build such a system yourself quite
| trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally
| with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted
| filesystem.
| EGreg wrote:
| Not sure why this would be easier or better
|
| FTP is not encrypted. Unless you use SFTP maybe. (I wrote
| an SFTP and FTP-over-SSH client in Visual Basic like 20
| yesrs ago lol).
|
| And even then, you miss out on all the optimizations with
| prolly trees and other goodness that rsync has.
|
| No, sorry, that solution sucks. CVS? That's super
| outdated.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| It's a reference to the infamous dropbox comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| Anyways, if you're at the grocery store and you need to
| see your shopping list, and you're happy with your
| current workflow of opening up Termux and typing `rsync
| -avrsomgwtfbbq me@server/shopping-list.txt` with your
| thumbs, then by all means keep doing that! For the rest
| of us, there's Syncthing.
| aniviacat wrote:
| > If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script
| to watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it
| happene.
|
| I use a tool that does that, it's called Syncthing.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yeah but if you're just syncing everything to and from a
| server anyway, why bother with it?
|
| Plus, rsync -a never deletes files.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Syncthing is a wonderful open source project that I thoroughly
| enjoyed using when my mobile device was on Android. Everything I
| needed was synced, all the time. Great performance, too. And it
| was really easy to set up syncing of a particular folder with
| random people for various projects.
|
| I switched to an iPhone for greater privacy, and was crushed to
| find Syncthing doesn't support iOS.
|
| I see that 5-6 years later they still don't. Sad, given the
| iPhone has a majority market share in the US (60%).
|
| I use Nextcloud and it's....okay. There's some weirdness where
| files I've specified should be always available somehow aren't,
| but luckily the keepass client keeps an internal/backup copy and
| is smart enough to open that.
|
| iCloud is just...a rolling dumpster fire. And easily the most
| frustrating thing about it is that there's no way to set up an
| iPhone without it immediately trying to sync everything to
| iCloud, like say, your iMessage encryption keys...
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I switched to an iPhone for greater privacy, and was crushed
| to find Syncthing doesn't support iOS.
|
| There is an app that wraps syncthing that is available on iOS
| but it's still quite gimped[0] due to how iOS does file
| management.
|
| [0]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/sync-mac-pc-and-ios-using-
| syncth...
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| I switched back to android for syncthing, totally worth it. I
| am on a galaxy s24, the battery life is not great compared to
| my last iPhone, and the camera takes poor photos, but other
| than that everything is better.
| tech234a wrote:
| There's a 3rd-party commercial app that brings Syncthing to iOS
| [1]. It's essentially a paid app, but periodically they'll
| release TestFlight versions as betas.
|
| [1]: https://mobiussync.com/ [2]:
| https://github.com/MobiusSync/MobiusSync/discussions/194
| citiguy wrote:
| On IOS there's Mobius Sync, which works perfectly with
| Syncthing.
| kookamamie wrote:
| Whenever I need to share files between two Windows computers in a
| LAN, I'll use this tool.
|
| It sounds kind of ridiculous, but just goes to show how
| crappy/difficult the Windows native file sharing is.
| bitbasher wrote:
| Anecdotal data, but it feels like a majority of the nice software
| I look up on Github ends up being written in Go.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| Golang definitely inspires confidence. My employer also uses
| it. I like that it's defaults do a good job at mitigating
| supply chain risks.
|
| https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain
|
| https://security.googleblog.com/2023/04/supply-chain-securit...
|
| https://security.googleblog.com/2023/06/supply-chain-securit...
| lmaoguy wrote:
| I found that it struggled with larger data sets. I have a
| directory that is 70TB and about 300,000+ files and
| unfortunately, it just can't handle that. Resilio (formerly
| BitTorrent Sync) handles it nicely and they just opened up to
| allow home users better access to it.
| diego_moita wrote:
| Syncthing + Raspberry Pi + Wireguard + Gitea = There's no
| "cloud"! It is just someone else's computer.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| I would like to reflect on all the positive sentiments here. I
| have been using it for years and I rarely have to look at or
| think about it more than once every two months. Even when I do
| need to look at it, it's just to realize I filled some drive and
| that's why it's not synchronizing anymore.
|
| I have no issues day-to-day and it's relatively easy to set up. I
| haven't played with the zero trust encrypted folder syncing yet
| but I will eventually :p
|
| I'm running it on Linux and Android but I started out with it on
| Windows. Thanks for the reminder about this software. I don't
| think I've donated in a couple years now.
| icelancer wrote:
| This system works extremely well unless you have a LOT of small
| files (like 200-400k or more). Then, unfortunately, it
| stalls/breaks in very weird ways.
|
| We had to move on and go with more manual synchronization methods
| like using robocopy and so forth.
|
| It's unfortunate given how awesome SyncThing + SyncTrazor works
| on Windows Servers. But I cannot recommend it highly enough if
| you don't have a system with a huge number of individual files -
| it works very well.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Syncthing - A decentralized continuous file synchronization
| program_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41281152 - Aug
| 2024 (23 comments)
|
| _Syncthing: A continuous file synchronization program_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35879039 - May 2023 (124
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing Anywhere with Tailscale_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32375662 - Aug 2022 (42
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing Stats_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012712 - July 2022 (4
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing: The Data Deduplication Master_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278867 - May 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing - a continuous file synchronization program_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28859521 - Oct 2021 (230
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing - continuous file synchronization program_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28371802 - Aug 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Syncthing: Syncing All the Things_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929194 - July 2021 (172
| comments)
|
| _Open Source Continuous File Synchronization_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149002 - May 2021 (146
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537243 - June 2020 (159
| comments)
|
| _Do not use Syncthing (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23116462 - May 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Emacs ' Org-Mode and Syncthing = Perfect (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23058358 - May 2020 (77
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing: An open source Dropbox replacement_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466469 - July 2019 (41
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing graduation day_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18832517 - Jan 2019 (114
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing Usage Data_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13856552 - March 2017 (119
| comments)
|
| _Syncthing_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331031 -
| Oct 2015 (1 comment)
|
| _BitTorrent backups - BTsync and Syncthing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207935 - Sept 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _Syncthing: Open Source Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync Replacement_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734114 - May 2014 (184
| comments)
| naveen99 wrote:
| https://hn.garglet.com/similar/stories/27929194
| aborsy wrote:
| Syncthing is probably the best sync software on market right now
| in my view. I have had very positive experience with it.
|
| I have an always on device that runs various applications
| including syncthing. Works great and sync is fast. Like send a
| movie from a computer to phone, and it gets there fast.
|
| I have started to use encrypted folders (beta feature). If you
| have a VPS, this might be a useful feature for you.
|
| I like that the transfers are peer to peer, and syncthing has
| been very secure so far.
| darkteflon wrote:
| Huge fan. Been using it for years with very few issues across
| Win10, MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu / PopOS, Steam Deck and even Quest 3.
| Fire and forget. Like Tailscale, don't know what I'd do without
| it.
| vibrant_mclean wrote:
| syncthing automtically connects with bunch of external servers
| automatically. Relays/discovery servers/stun etc. You can disable
| but they are enabled by default. They connect on first run and
| before you get a chance to disable - atleast on android.
| Everything may be encrypted but I still prefer to not connect to
| external servers
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(page generated 2024-09-29 23:01 UTC)