Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program • Hacker News Board

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#131

Post by bipson » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:04 PM UTC

Reventlov wrote: post #12

KennyBlanken wrote: post #5

Syncthing works brilliantly! The web UI is excellent, warns you when you're about to do something ill-advised, and stuff like QR codes makes adding clients and folders fairly easy. The separation between folders and devices is handled well. You can easily have half a dozen shared folders between several computers with any mix-and-match combination including which one is 'authoritative' and so on. I used to use it on…

I would not qualify the web UI of "excellent" : understanding the relations between paired devices, remote devices, folders you want to sync, and so on is harder than what it should be. Likewise, the android application is so bad the best way is to open the web UI on your phone to do stuff (and sometimes, it's the only way to achieve some goals). There is definitely a lot of room for improvement for easier adoption,…

The first thing I really like about syncthing is that it does what it is supposed to do very well (besides very seldom glitches), while not being dropbox, nextcloud, owncloud, etc. but p2p and entirely independent of any external tools/devices/etc.

The second thing I like is that it is a successful FOSS project, meaning it works and is being regularly and often improved by its users.

Your comment, as helpful as you may feel it is, is contradictory to my second - very strong - feeling.

I really think to UI works quite good, and by god, if a better solution is so obvious to you, why haven't you proposed it yet, or - god forbid - made a merge/pull request??

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#132

Post by marcellus23 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #112

oauea wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Apple. You are of course welcome to pay their exorbitant development fees yourself, go through the insane review process and publish your own competing app!

You can't publish your own competing app. The desired behaviour requires running a background service (not allowed) that watches arbitrary folders (not allowed).

I think you lost the plot - you can publish a competing app that uses the Files app for sync, just like NextCloud does.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#133

Post by marcellus23 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:07 PM UTC

oauea wrote: post #109

KennyBlanken wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I guess I should qualify that and say that there's no iOS client that is actually practical to use . NextCloud integrates into iOS's Files app pretty tightly as a 'storage provider' or whatever Apple calls it. End result is that my password database is magically up-to-date whenever I go to use it in my password manager, probably because Files sees an app trying to access the file, pings NextCloud to say "yo, is…

It's Apple. You are of course welcome to pay their exorbitant development fees yourself, go through the insane review process and publish your own competing app!

$99/year is hardly exorbitant.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#134

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:13 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #129

pjc50 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place. Maybe it's possible to .. not do that?

You expect me to not use a basic feature of a compiler? o_O weird take but k

If a build system produces an adverse outcome, it is often possible to customize it so that it does not delete things which you would rather not have deleted. (I've no idea whether this is specifically easy or not in gradle)

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#135

Post by HKH2 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #98

HKH2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put a non-empty placeholder file in that folder, it won't be empty any more, so it shouldn't be removed.

Yea but it doesn't matter. The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place. I don't care. Just sync the path. That's all I need. Instead Syncthing literally stop syncing ALL folders because "oh no something went wrong". For whatever reason open source software always has these weird edge case engineering "solutions" that really aren't that great. If someone was actually a paying…

> The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place.

That's really bizarre behavior. If the folder has no files or zero byte files then it might make sense, but if gradle's deleting non-empty files that don't concern it, that seems to be more of a problem with gradle.

I get the point though; if there's no versioning, why bother having an empty folder?

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#136

Post by miki123211 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:29 PM UTC

I have to pitch Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) here.

It's a proprietary, more polished alternative that offers a freeware license for personal use.

My biggest issue with Syncthing was that there was no auto-discovery, if you had 25 or so computers across a group of friends, you needed to set up 25^2 connections, which wasn't really feasible. Not sure if this is still a thing, but Resilio solves this perfectly, you just input a secret key and computers just connect automatically. The developers also provide turn servers, which is useful in restrictive NAT scenarios. End-to-end encryption is supported, both in the free and the pro versions, although the latter gives you much more control over who can do what to the folder.

I use Resilio as a "big Dropbox" with dozens of gigabytes of data per folder, shared across a small-ish group of trusted friends. It doesn't cost us anything and works really well.

The largest folders I've seen had over a terabyte of data in them, but you probably want the pro version (with selective sync) for those.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#137

Post by fps_doug » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:32 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #136

I have to pitch Resilio Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) here. It's a proprietary, more polished alternative that offers a freeware license for personal use. My biggest issue with Syncthing was that there was no auto-discovery, if you had 25 or so computers across a group of friends, you needed to set up 25^2 connections, which wasn't really feasible. Not sure if this is still a thing, but Resilio solves this perfectl…

Syncthing supports introducer devices. If you mark a device as introducer, you'll automatically add all devices the introducer knows to your list. So basically adding a new device to an existing group requires everyone to agree on one introducer, and everyone will add the new device automatically.

NAT traversal and relay servers exist too. So seems it's pretty much on par with Resilio, plus open source.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#138

Post by j1elo » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:33 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #124

j1elo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial products usually aim to satisfy its paying customer's needs. FOSS is, not always but most times, about satisfying one's own needs. So it won't be that easy to change a developer's mind who is determined about their way of doing things even if it is not the best way for others.

It's also kind of arrogant of FOSS advocates to say "just make a pull request" whenever there's criticism of anything FOSS. You could spend weeks working on something only to have the maintainer say no and I've seen this happen and every time it does I just think to myself "welp there's another person who will never make another pull request again".

As a FOSS maintainer I always try to make it clear that before trying your luck with a PR, you should always first engange in a conversation with me.

Seems kind of obvious to my eyes, asking, talking, discussing about some change before doing the actual work. But as it seems, "obviousness" is in the eye of the beholder...

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#139

Post by fps_doug » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

makeworld wrote: post #127

KennyBlanken wrote: post #5

Syncthing works brilliantly! The web UI is excellent, warns you when you're about to do something ill-advised, and stuff like QR codes makes adding clients and folders fairly easy. The separation between folders and devices is handled well. You can easily have half a dozen shared folders between several computers with any mix-and-match combination including which one is 'authoritative' and so on. I used to use it on…

> Lots of controls, especially in the forked android client. Here's that fork: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android You can also search up Syncthing-Fork on Google Play.

Yes that was annoying to me at first. The official client seems to still get updates, so you don't immediately see anything wrong with it, but has a couple really annoying issues that have been fixed in Syncthing-fork for years.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#140

Post by alias_neo » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #5

Syncthing works brilliantly! The web UI is excellent, warns you when you're about to do something ill-advised, and stuff like QR codes makes adding clients and folders fairly easy. The separation between folders and devices is handled well. You can easily have half a dozen shared folders between several computers with any mix-and-match combination including which one is 'authoritative' and so on. I used to use it on…

I tried Syncthing, then I tried Nextcloud, and for the goal of just syncing camera roll and backing up my password manager, they were both a bit of a hassle.

Now I use Minio with FolderSync (Android App, I use the paid one, but the free is perfectly capable) to backup my camera roll and I wrote a very simply WebDAV server in Go to backup my (Android) password manager DB which only supports WebDAV, I sit NGINX in front of them both to terminate TLS and to handle basic auth for the WebDAV server, though I could easily implement basic auth in that too (again, my password manager only supports basic auth).

If someone can suggest a better password manager for Android with a good UI, good integration (e.g. auto-fill), has a Linux desktop app and can backup to WebDAV or Minio I'd jump in a heartbeat.

I considered Bitwarden, but I don't want to run the Mono/Windows server container, and I don't want to rely on the Rust port which is behind in features and is susceptible to the upstream breaking APIs.