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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking of buying a home NAS and running Syncthing as a replacement for Dropbox/Google Drive. Does anyone have any recommendations? Synology comes up a lot, I might also just use a Raspberry Pi.

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I've been doing this with an rpi+ usb3-attached ssd for years (kept upgrading rpis). Syncing across my laptop, phone and server (server backing it up nightly). Worked well for years.

Now moved to a more powerful machine, but the concept is still the same.

This setup allowed me to conveniently stop using google drive.

You can reuse old PC parts and install TrueNAS on outdated hardware, it will likely be more stable than anything built with Raspberry Pis.

I used to run Syncthing on an old mac mini with two 2.5" HDD running FreeNAS (previous name of TrueNAS).

Not sure about mac mini, but some old machines might draw considerably more power than rpi. Rpi has a problem with sd cards, but you can make it use them in the read-only mode, in which case rpi becomes a very reliable computing device.

Currently running Syncthing on an RPi 4 NAS, in a docker container. Works great between RPi, laptop and desktop.

Haven't tried it while out-and-about, though that's not really my use case.

*RPi4 NAS has one external thumb drive for flash storage and two spinning rust drives, one for storage, one for backup; all connected via USB. Occasionally I have to plug-unplug the spinning rust drives if the system reboots, as the drives go to sleep.

Syncthing for desktops / servers "Just works". I've used it between an AWS instance and my home network for years. Highly recommended.

I finally got rid of it because of the awful mobile experience, but frankly I shouldn't have been counting on that anyway.

On Android it works acceptably. On iOS (at least iPad) you have the proprietary Möbius sync port which is a bit annoying in that it requires a regular push notification to perform any syncing, but with iOS 15 focus modes you can hide it without breaking the app. Only a few months left if you don't want to run the betas.

What problems were you experiencing on mobile?

Do you encrypt the data going up to Amazon or just raw dog it?

I use unRaid and Nextcloud.

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