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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

When I started using syncthing some years ago it worked, but it was still a bit brittle. I ran over time into several situations where the sync would just stop or not start, be slow, some error happened somewhere and the GUI did not show them properly, there was no built in reacting to file modification, just a regular sync interval. It was good enough to be used, but certainly not done yet.

Yesterday I installed it again on my main PC (part of a migration from a different linux distro) and I was impressed: The notifications when adding new devices arrived with a very small delay, syncing just worked, file monitoring is now built in, the error message related to that (inotify limit) was helpful.

Syncthing came a long way and is great software, congrats for reaching 1.0!

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I switched to Syncthing from Dropbox a few months ago. While there are a handful of warts, the actual syncing seems to Just Work (TM). I am massively impressed with this, as building even a centralized file hosting service is quite the undertaking. I donated and I'd encourage others to do it as well, link on the homepage: https://syncthing.net/

> handful of warts

What type of issues?

What I'm thinking of are synced ignore lists of some sort. I think I read in the issue tracker that this is something they plan to change eventually.

And related, sync % reflecting ignored files. For example I've ignored a bunch of transient things like node_modules so my backup server sync is permanently at 70% even though it's actually up to date with all the files I want synced.

I do this in two steps:

1. An "stignore.txt" at the root of a shared directory. This gets automatically synced to every device.

2. "#include stignore.txt" in '.stignore' that I need to manually write on every new device.

I've been using Syncthing for a few months, and it has been bulletproof. Truly set and forget. I was extremely apprehensive when I started, but it convinced me. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I started shortly after Dropbox deprecated BTRFS and told me to move to a "better" FS like FAT.

After the initial setup, which wasn't that hard after all, but took more effort than doing nothing and continue on Dropbox I was amazed. My setup became better as now my phone is a real client that syncs files, not just a file browser that can "star" and cache some files, and there's more granularity on what's shared.

For those who don't know (including me) could you explain what you mean by deprecating BTRFS? I don't understand how the file system is relevant to a file syncing app like Dropbox.

Neither does.. well anyone. Dropbox decided to drop support for BTRFS and pretty much any other Linux file system that isn't ext4, and to my knowledge still hasn't explained their rationale to this day.

See: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Error-messages/Dropbox-clien...

Sharing the reason is either a legal risk, or a loss of competitive advantage risk (some optimization that only works when their whole pool is in particular format).

As of last November, Dropbox only supports ext4 on Linux, NFTS on Windows, and HFS+/APFS on Mac. Couldn't tell you the technical reasons for the change, but they're listed here:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system-requirements...

Funnily enough, the Android app not being (or not having the option) to be a browser and cache is one of the things holding me back from wholeheartedly embracing Syncthing. Different needs for different users.

I'm aware of https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing-lite but the consensus seems to be it is not quite there yet. I should perhaps give it another go.

This is why I run both Syncthing and Nextcloud. As you say, different needs.

What's wrong with the android 'app'? It works fine and besides initial setup I have openned it like maybe 3(?) times in the 3 years I have used it.

Probably i use syncthing in the most odd way.

I've around 70 servers with syncthing on them and i am using it with Route53 for use as CDN.

One thing i am missing is that, i want to sync in a way that it's aware of the network topology and syncs from the nearest network first.

The downside is that all your data lives on every server.

Is there a smart way to sync only needed data using p2p for CDN application?

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