Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

syncthing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 233 posts

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#151

Post by rjzzleep »

alias_neo wrote: post #140
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 fron…

Keepass2Android/KeepassDX with Nextcloud? I don't understand how running Minio with a custom built webdav server is easier than Nextcloud has integrated WebDAV access.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#152

Post by MikusR »

raek wrote: post #75

Regarding backups... Syncthing is great for propagating changes to all devices, but does not offer much in terms of backups and previous versions of files. (And I'm fine with that. I consider that to be out of scope for Syncthing.) I've been thinking about solving the backup part by letting one of the devices perform btrfs snapshots on its storage. Does anyone know about any write-up that describes or compares such s…

Syncthing has many options for versioning. Ability to keep versions of files is THE reason I use it.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#153

Post by ncphil »

gnulinux wrote: post #8

Is there an obvious way to use this with rclone?

... I actually use rclone mount _instead_ of sync for cloud storage. Tried syncthing a long while ago after finding nextcloud unreliable. Then stumbled acrosss a comment somewhere that talked about the mount feature in rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/). This is probably only practical for me now because we've got a 1G/1G pipe to the Internet. On the internal network I'm back to using nfs mounts (or samba for the Windows machines). Syncthing is good, but over time I've found all sync solutions to fall short. For backups I use a combination of rsync to the file server on both Linux and Windows, and then rclone out to the cloud.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#154

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> The web UI is excellent

The web UI is perhaps the only pain point of syncthing. It's very confusing around folder paths VS IDs, especially around the "Default Folder".

Functions like Actions > Show ID are presented poorly.

Importantly, the UI is not intuitive at all. You need to read the docs to understand what you are supposed to do.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#155

Post by aasasd »

On Android, Syncthing-fork is a bit nicer because it has a native app interface instead of the embedded web interface. However, on Android 11 the Play Store release doesn't work with folders other than /Android/media or the app's data folder or something like that—because of Google's continuous crusade against file access, effective for the newer API level that Syncthing-fork is targeting. But the F-Droid version doesn't have this problem.

Note that the mainstream Syncthing on Android works so far only because they're targeting an older API version. They will hit the same restriction if they migrate to the new API, unless they implement SAF or whatever.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#156

Post by JeremyNT »

deaddabe wrote: post #57
Daegalus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try out Synctrayzor for the laptop and desktop. it lets you set it to auto start on boot.

Thanks for the suggestion. This is an app for Windows [0] but everything I use is Linux, so the setup to start SyncThing it at boot should be straightforward. I am more worried about the Android part. The best solution would be to start SyncThing when on my LAN via matching SSID, and disable it when I am out of range. [0] https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor

Syncthing Fork has this feature, and others enhancements [0].

[0] https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android-fdroid

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#157

Post by nyanpasu64 »

aasasd wrote: post #155

On Android, Syncthing-fork is a bit nicer because it has a native app interface instead of the embedded web interface. However, on Android 11 the Play Store release doesn't work with folders other than /Android/media or the app's data folder or something like that—because of Google's continuous crusade against file access, effective for the newer API level that Syncthing-fork is targeting. But the F-Droid version doe…

Syncthing-Fork can't send broadcast mDNS packets on Android 11. As a result, two Android 11 devices can't even connect to each other over a LAN, and are reduced to sending all traffic to the Internet and back, which wastes bandwidth, probably hurts privacy, and throttles transfer speeds. The workaround I found was to hard-code one device's IP address in the other. Perhaps Syncthing is unaffected; I didn't test.

Link: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/local-discovery-problem-on-and...

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#158

Post by djbusby »

dolni wrote: post #145
bipson wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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?? Because there isn't any obligation to? Why do you think you would be entitled to ask for that?

Aren't they just suggesting to open a bug/issue in place of complaining on HN? Seems a fair, small ask to me.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#159

Post by SanchoPanda »

I would like to give a shout out to `unison` for syncing needs. It can be used with a daemon, but I use it happily with cron and it has been absolutely bulletproof* for years. I have never noticed it's resource usage at all after running the initial sync.

I am never modifying the same file on two systems simultaneously, so I can afford to sync hourly with no issues. While not everyone can do this, I suspect many are in the same boat.

* Try to use literally the exact same binary where architectures allow, due to build dependencies.

Re: Syncthing – a continuous file synchronization program

#160

Post by MaXtreeM »

j1elo wrote: post #123
deaddabe wrote: post #21

I have switched from Nextcloud to Syncthing. The former was a resource hog that was eating up too much everything on my modest VPS. I share the files on my local network at home between phone, laptop and desktop. My only issues so far: - I need to manually start Syncthing on the devices, whereas Nextcloud was always running on boot. Not sure if I should start it every time, especially on the Android phone which canno…

> [Nextcloud] was a resource hog that was eating up too much everything on my modest VPS. I've seen comments like this in multiple occasions. Is it really that bad? I guess if there was a flagrant performance bug, it would have been sorted out with time, so the only remaining explanation is that the code is really poorly laid out, or with design flaws that cause so many performance problems for users. However next to…

The Nextcloud Windows desktop client is very poorly written. We needed an in-house file hosting solution to replace really old Samba shares and Nextcloud seemed like a great option because we also were looking for a non-Google alternative to Google Docs/Drive (one of our clients has anti-Google policy).

After moving all files to Nextcloud server everyone (company of 20+ people) installed Nextcloud Windows Desktop client and connected to it with only virtual files option set (nothing is transfered until opened/edited). The initial "sync" after first seup took about 2-3 days to complete for everyone. Reason? Probably too many small files. The share contained about 300+GB of data in around 500k files (not sure about that number only a guess). Nextcloud checks every single file with server which computes hash for it which is stored locally. You can find threads on their community forum or reddit by people experiencing same slow behavior when they have a lot of small files. There were some promises from devs to resolve it with the latest client update but we didn't verify it yet.

Post reply on HN