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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I'm using syncthing to sync three computers. Two slaves connected to one 24/7/365 online master. Unless I'm behind a very aggressive firewall, I can connect to master to sync everything.

It creates a big peace-of-mind. Debian's version was built with iNotify for a very long time, so I never got big CPU spikes. I think iNotify is merged into master last year or so.

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I don't remember enabling iNotify earlier than it was merged in master. Did I miss a build flag that enabled it earlier than I should have?

Anyways, I'll use this opportunity to say that it has always been great to work with the guys at Syncthing. They responded quickly to every issue that we have ran into. For example, the switch from FontAwesome to ForkAwesome was done for due to a Debian issue:

- https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/5236

IIRC, the package description said something similar to "this is the iNotify version of the syncthing binary", or I may be completely wrong. I need to get previous versions and look to the descriptions of each :)

You might mix that up with syncthing-inotify, which was an external small inotify watcher that then pinged syncthing via its API. It was the recommended way to get inotify support till the functionality got merged.

Maybe, however all my Debian installations are very strict in their repository configuration, and I'm failing to see syncthing-inotify package in Debian snapshots server [0].

...or maybe I'm making all these up from all the things I read while researching syncthing, who knows :)

Regardless of all, it's working very well and it's dependable now, and it's the point I think :D

[0]: https://snapshot.debian.org/package/?cat=s

Addenda: Actually, forgetting all little details about it is a reliable sign of an application working well and just disappears to the background IMHO.

How reliable has it been? Do you mind sharing the number of files in the shared directories and their total size? I am asking because when I was searching for a cloudless Dropbox replacement, some tools would lose some files (or truncate them to zero).

Then I found Resilio Sync and I've been using it for about 3 years now without any problems. Now I have a feeling that Bittorrent Inc will abandon the project after the acquisition. Syncthing is looking promising.

SyncThing has been completely reliable for the past two years across my Android phone, Linux laptop, and a Linux NAS.

I use it to backup photos / videos that I capture on my phone, as well as to sync my KeePass database and Org Mode files which I edit on both my phone and laptop, often concurrently. My largest folder is 46 GB across 9,416 files.

The SyncThing Usage Data dashboard at https://data.syncthing.net/ has really interesting statistics: apparently at the 50th percentile, users are syncing more than 5,300 files and over 12.3 GB of data.

Wow, either I'm reading the stats wrong, or someone has 84.6 TiB in Syncthing. That's impressive.

I don't think this is too crazy as long as it's made up of big files (video perhaps?)

I'm using Syncthing for misc files but accidentally dropped a large git repo in it about a month ago... All the tiny files caused it to really chug.

Not that this is really Syncthing's fault.. file system operations over many files just tend to be way slower.

Unless I kill the service accidentally, its uptime is equal to the system's uptime.

I sync documents and wallpapers accross my computers, I didn't see any corrupted or truncated file, it has been completely reliable from that point of view.

Also, as I said before, if the firewall of the place I connect is not extremely hostile, I can connect to it from anywhere in the world (it also has a auto-fallback to Tor). If you want to go completely dark, you can run your own tracker too. :)

My file stats are: 641 files, 85 folders, ~980 MB size.

> also has a auto-fallback to Tor

1. That is neat.

2. Could you please say how you did this?

I didn't do anything. When I checked the local page (localhost:8384) to see how syncthing is doing, one of the clients had a tor address in the list of "last known" addresses :)

I've been using it with SyncTrayzor on Windows for a few years and have found it extremely reliable. Currently syncing 3 computers with ~ 10,500 files, 600 folders, and 280 GiB. It is set up for LAN only, as I don't have a use case for syncing on the go.

Resilio is already a separated spinoff from Bittorrent Inc. You don't have to worry about Bittorrent abandoning it ... just Resilio itself going under! (Which might be quite likely, since it's so small on its own.)

I sure hope they don't go under (Resilio). Why do you say it's "quite likely"?

Because their only revenue is selling licenses of Resilio to corporations, and my hunch is that's a hard sell.

I might be wrong. Maybe they can compete with dropbox by being cheaper!

I liked Bittorrent Sync and later Resilio Sync a lot, but they have been very unreliable when it comes to pricing and licensing, changing both several times.

Their license structure is currently worthless to me. I have a license, but that is only for home use. They only offer subscription licenses for business. Subscription licenses are harder to purchase in some organizations, plus everyone that I want to offer files to needs to buy a license as well. This is a large downgrade from e.g. Dropbox, where one can just hand out download links, open file submission requests, etc.

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