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Comment by odabaxok | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone share their experiences with Syncthing compared to Resilio Sync (aka Bit Torrent Sync)?

I am using Resilio Sync since its beta version, but they have added a lot of restrictions since then and made some functions only available for paying users.

I am concerned about ease of use (setup and everyday usage) on Windows and Android.

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Oh boy can I ever.

We used Resilio Sync (aka Bittorrent Sync aka BT Sync) for a while for the Tron project ( https://reddit.com/r/TronScript ). It worked great for our use-case: distributing a large number of files to a large number of nodes who required read-only access. Anytime I changed a file on the master node it would blast out to everyone else while simultaneously preventing any other node in the swarm from propagating changes.

Unfortunately with all the restrictions they introduced, it stopped working reliably. Internally they introduced a hard-coded peer cap of something like 32, while our swarm was already over 500.

We switched to Syncthing and it's been working well. There is still one major issue and that's that anyone can mark their copy of the folder as "read-only" (formerly called "Master"), and then they will attempt to propagate changes out to the rest of the swarm. So, there's that. But strictly on a distributed file syncing level, it works great.

Do you have a reference to this 32 node cap for Resilio? I just tried doing a quick search and did not see any specific results showing this limit. Thanks.

I found the original thread, turns out the peer count is 50 (not 32 like I originally stated).

Here's the thread in question: https://forum.resilio.com/topic/30525-please-please-please-p...

It's now 100 active peers per folder:

https://forum.resilio.com/topic/41520-max-number-of-users-fo...

That's interesting... so even the original 'master' client is treated equally? Other clients can decide to send/receive amongst themselves?

How do you deal with that?

I basically post a warning that says "be aware that someone might attempt this." There's unfortunately nothing I can do about it with the way Syncthing is currently architected. We haven't had any malicious users yet but I'm sure we will eventually.

Fallback is just to provide a static .exe on the mirrors and leave the Resilio Sync node running alongside it.

There is no concept of a single "Master". The folder types are "Send & Receive" and "Send only" and the latter will not accept changes from any other client. I still agree it's not the best solution for a network you don't control and that might have a malicious actor in it.

I used syncthing when it first came out on windows and it was very easy to set up so i can only assume its improved since then, and the android app is quite good. it has a large number of settings and you can make it only run when you're charging so you dong use all your batter.

Thanks for the reply.

In the meantime, I have checked Syncthing forums and I have found this topic: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/why-im-moving-back-to-btsync-r... It is exactly complaining about the ease of use on Windows and Android, saying there is no native GUI, etc. From this description it seems, that Syncthing is not there, yet.

There isnt a native gui, in that its in the browser but that isnt really a problem i would have said. it allows the developers to focus on a cross-platform good backend and have a crossplatform frontend without the issues that come with having that.

There are a number of projects which make life easier for Windows users (tray icon, autostart, make it look and feel and bit more like a Windows application, bundle filesystem notifications, etc). Two of the big ones are SyncTrayzor (https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor) and Syncthing-GTK (https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-gtk).

See the Community Contributions page (https://docs.syncthing.net/users/contrib.html) for the full list.

I tried to switch to SyncThing BUT firewalls at various locations just tripped me up. Resilio Sync breaks through the firewalls with no problem. That's my only issue.

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