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Comment by srijan4 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using syncthing for more than 3 years, and it's been just amazing. It replaced dropbox for me completely, and provides a better experience in all aspects - speed, stability, low power usage on mobile.

One of the few projects I'm sponsoring on Github.

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Syncthing is more of a synchronization tool and less of a backup tool. For e.g., if I screwed up a file on one machine, that will automatically be replicated to other machines. Dropbox, on the other hand, "can" be used as a backup tool because I can go and recover an older version if I want.

I do know that Syncthing has a way to keep older file versions around for awhile but I find that a bit cumbersome to use, especially during restore.

So, I am curious to understand more on how you use Syncthing as a replacement to Dropbox. (I'd love to do the same but don't for reasons I wrote above.)

I don't see why should Syncthing be a complete replacement for Dropbox (Unix principles blah blah blah). It's probably not hard to set up a periodic backup (for example, Borg) on one of the replicated machines. At home, I replicate everything on my phone and netbook to a (bigger) desktop machine, so I could just add a periodic backup job there.

Turn on staggered file versioning.

If you need to go back to an older version, pick it in .stversions .

If anything, this seems simpler than dropbox for me. Does Dropbox still make you use the web UI to restore old versions?

Yep, still have to use the web UI. Just switched to syncthing from dropbox a month ago, been awesome so far!

Ah, I never considered or used Dropbox as a backup tool, only for synchronization. Backup is separate.

For simple undo operations (recover a recently deleted file), Syncthing's version history is good enough.

Ditto. Sometimes I get some CPU spikes but overall it has been amazing.

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