Syncthing: A continuous file synchronization program
syncthing.net
syncthing.net
I think the developers made the right decision focusing the software on peer to peer sync (i.e., not expanding to nearby “cloud features”: backup, photos, videos, office, etc).
Syncthing is like the reliable, quiet roommate who always does their dishes, whereas dealing with different file systems feels like trying to figure out who left their half-eaten pizza on the couch.
Just needs the iOS app!
Say you have a pictures directory shared via Möbius Sync. Then you want to edit one of the pictures with a pictures editing app that is not the builtin photos app. The app crashes, or cannot save an edited copy of the file into the same directory. I encountered this in real life.
This is how it is done https://github.com/CharlesChiuGit/Logseq-Git-Sync-101/wiki/F...
Isn’t this no longer the case for the last 5 years or so?
‘Files’ allows to access local non iCloud folders and every app with the right entitlement can write/read there.
You can even integrate your own cloud service into ’Files’ making in indistinguishable from iCloud (in some ways at least).
I could care less about that, I just want it to appear in Files.app
... but it's not available in the iOS FR app store (is it available anywhere but in the US app store?), so, deal breaker.
- Syncthing is available in the Play Store. If it wasn't, I could use F-Droid or simply download the app from Github.
- It works in the background and it has access to my folders. I can take a picture and few seconds later it's on my PC without having to change or move anything.
Not saying that iOS is bad, but I felt tied when I had to use it. It's not for me.
https://github.com/MobiusSync/MobiusSync/issues/27#issuecomm...
Apparently Blink hit the same snag, which was resolved.
Is this new behaviour? I haven't set up a new device recently, but it always asked me if I want to enable that or not.
The arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability is much more troubling and critical, however. Most people don't realize that by running syncthing they grant the syncthing developer the ability to execute any code they want on their machine (including the ability to read or exfiltrate any file on the filesystem).
I find this a curious, borderline alarmist framing of the automatic update mechanism. Many pieces of software have automatic updates. What you say is no less true for common programs like Firefox or Google Chrome.
Obviously you have to consider your threat model, but the number of people willing to trust a specific Syncthing binary they're downloading from the internet, but who are wary of trusting published updates going forward, must be relatively small.
(I am a Linux user and use the OS packages rather than automatic updates, but automatic updates are quite common outside of Linux distro packages)
Anyone who can compromise the syncthing release process can run code on thousands of devices.
The only solution is to blank a few URLs in the configuration for things that can't be disabled. Then at first sight it seems to work... But you check your firewall logs a few days later and what do you know? Some dropped connection attempts.
Still, there aren't many alternatives that work as well as SyncThing, so you gotta pick your battles...
the primary use for syncthing on my phone is to make sure data is backed up immediately.
i have yet to find an app that has the resilience and flexibility of syncthing for this purpose.
apart from that the primary issue i have with syncthing is that the app on a device can not tell me if all data in a particular folder is fully copied to the other device. it only tells me if all local folders are complete.
it also gets confusing when you have more than a few devices and sync between all of them. i recently discovered that i had a set up A<->B<->C but A and C were not connected. i never noticed because A and C were always in sync, until device B died. but it took me some time to notice that because i didn't realize that i missed to connect A to C directly.
it would be nice to have some way to get an overview of the whole graph to see what syncs to where.
i also occasionally use the phone to take photos of items that i want to process on my laptop right away. syncthing is faster and more convenient than taking my camera and then moving the sd card from the camera to the laptop.
for nextcloud i would need to set up a server that probably also needs to be always online. syncthing allows me to backup to my laptop and is opportunistic about it, ie whenever both are on wifi.
i am also using syncthing to manage my audio files. on the laptop i decide what i want to listen to by copying the files into a specific folder, and that gets copied to the phone. when i am done with a file i delete it from the phone, and that gets synced back to the laptop. syncthing is perfect here, and so using it for backup in the other cases is worth it over having yet another solution.
That's a dealbreaker for iOS folks, though.
I hate the mission creep Dropbox has embraced, and would definitely consider something else, but I need access to my stuff on Windows, MacOS, and iOS. Anything that doesn't hit all three notes isn't a contender.
I take a photo with with my phone and it's synced to my Linux desktop in 1-2 seconds.
That speaks more to your failure than to iOS's. I've been getting meaningful work done on iOS for a decade.
It sure is popular for a certain sort of HN poster, presumably deeply insecure about their own choices, to drop in and do their best to shit on iOS whenever anyone says something positive about it. It's predictable as clockwork, but as useful as tits on a bull.
Working with the filesystem was very tricky in the past but this is no longer the case with https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider for the past 4-5 years.
Any sort of basic interaction outside of their own ecosystem even through established standards and protocols is made difficult or impossible.
Case in point, I wanted to transfer a pic from an Android phone to an IPhone and was surprised to find that ios doesn't allow bluetooth file transfer!
It is completely ridiculous to think that you need to involve a third-party app/service or device to transfer small amounts of data between two very expensive communication devices sitting next to each other.
Weird. I interact with ALL SORTS of other systems via established or even proprietary protocols using my iOS devices.
>Case in point, I wanted to transfer a pic from an Android phone to an IPhone and was surprised to find that ios doesn't allow bluetooth file transfer!
This is the kind of thing that Android people like to complain about, but the complaint is based in a failure to appreciate that iOS doesn't work like Android.
There's only very limited interaction with the file system in iOS. This is by design. Complaining about that is like complaining that the original Mac had no command line. It's missing the point.
Sharing photos between phones is most often done via messaging or email. That works beautifully. In neither case is a third party service required.
There are additional avenues for photo sharing between two iOS devices, but those are features of the platform. It's not a failure of iOS that they don't work with Android.
The third party is the mail server and the internet.
It's still ridiculous.
This is the kind of thing Android people complain about, but it never comes up for iOS people. Sharing a photo from a computer involves plenty of "third party" actions, too; it's just not a big deal. It's simple and intuitive.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Airdrop is basically the same thing as Android's Quick Share/Nearby Share, utilizing BT to find and pair devices, and then perform a direct wifi transfer of data. Android<->Android works no problem. iOS/MacOS<->iOS/MacOS no problem. Hell, I can even do this between Android devices and Windows/Linux machines. But Android<-/->iOS/MacOS - FOR NO GOOD REASON other than to keep them separate for capitalist reasons (doesn't matter what excuse you give it, brand differentiation, brand protection, walled-garden security - they're all excuses at the end of the day).
>There's only very limited interaction with the file system in iOS. This is by design.
In response to that, Apple can very easily extend the functionality over the API-layer to allow the sharing of, AT LEAST, photos and videos between Android and iOS/MacOS devices without having to worry so much about this issue. No need to give direct filesystem access.
Is there anything that is a dealbreaker for "iOS folks"? If usability would have been a dealbreaker they might not have been on iOS in the first place.
Let's just look at Syncthing not being on iOS - Apple makes sure things like Syncthing can't be on iOS. Mobius Sync does a trillion workarounds to give a semblance of being on iOS. So maybe "iOS folks" should reach out to Apple talking about why softwares like Syncthing (which is top notch!) is not on "iOS".
I mean for heaven's sake Apple keeps devices so limited and they themselves don't write softwares to fully utilise a device's capacities and features and don't let anyone else write them. I was reading Logic Pro on iPad comments a day ago and "iOS folks" instead of being enraged at Apple giving peanuts in terms of capability on a fully capable device (that too after years and then not opening it up for other devs), they were going crazy as if Jesus just made third appearance on the fruit company website.
I've only come across a few hiccups:
- Sometimes MacOS updates "break" Syncthing (fairly easy to fix, just have to re-authorize permissions)
- Sometimes you end up with a (large) file/folder syncing that you don't want to sync.. Trying to sneak in an ignore rule after the fact and delete the file/folder from the device you don't want it on? That usually doesn't go over well.. I usually end up having to pause sync and fix the resulting conflict manually.
There is. Check out Mobius Sync - it’s as fast as PC on foreground and supports background syncing (albeit slower). You do have to pay a little but it’s worth the cost and you get it forever. I use it routinely to sync all my files on PC on the go.
(I of course also use git, but syncthing lets me choose when I push while still having all my work on all my machines.)
My only complaint so far and I've been using it for years. At first it started as a way to have my Keepass file in sync between computers, and evolved from that.
cd ~/Sync/git
mkdir reponame
cd reponame
git init --bare
cd ~/work
git clone ~/Sync/git/reponame
There was some other comment near here about ignoring .git directories. I guess they're using it to store the working directory rather than just the repository, as there is no .git directory stored in ~/Sync/ in my situation.
On PC, you also selectively sync folders. I dunno about access to all the files though. Definitely works in the browser, but on PC, you either sync the folder or don't.
Recently, I switched completely off cloud storage to just using Syncthing and I love it.
Anyway, this is great software.
Rock-solid, gracefully handles long periods of one or more machines going offline (eg personal use computers in a home network), partly configurable with text files. The way it can be set for one-way syncs also opens up new use cases.
I use it for syncing documents, video capture, certain config files - even my ROM collection to my Steam Deck.
The only place you really shouldn’t use it is on Git repos - something that is probably obvious to anyone who has used a git branch, but worth re-stating. For a simple repo with only a main branch you want on just two machines - eg dev desktop and laptop - you might get away with it for a little while but it’s extremely brittle and will eventually trip you up - through no fault of Syncthing or Git, I should add. Just fundamentally incompatible paradigms.
My MacBook, an always-on Pi, and a few other boxes run syncthing for a directory full of Markdown files that I use with Notational Velocity[0] on Mac and 1Writer[1] (highly recommended!) on iOS. Using it this way for a couple years and it works well, occasionally go through and diff the sync conflict files that slowly accumulate, small hassle that is worth the squeeze IMO.
[0]: https://notational.net/ [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id680469088
Garage claims performance across long distances (up to 200ms per their front page).
It's not a POSIX file system. Instead it's more like S3. You could put something in front of it, perhaps, to make it POSIX.
Although in your case I would probably use ZFS snapshots through syncoid, they'd be much more efficient than anything else.
Right now I'm actually using it for a very small minecraft server on Fly.io. The game server runs on a "bigger" instance, and there's a web server running on a much smaller (and therefore "free") instance, for displaying the game map and similar things. Syncthing copies the generated squaremap tiles to the webserver, so when the game server is down, the map is still available
I haven't seen a ton of great options unfortunately :/
it's not the perfect solution though because when one server is offline for a while and needs to catch up that too is very slow. the only solution there i find is to have enough redundant servers that you can afford to have a server go offline and not worry about getting it back online quickly.
It works... pretty well. I won't lie and say it works perfectly with all of our other file utilities and scripts we run, but 95-97% of the time I never think about it.
I use it with SyncTrazor on Windows Server deployments as well as Debian servers and yeah, I could be happier, but I highly doubt there's anything out there that can beat SyncThing overall.
Just know that with that many files the initial scans and DB building will be brutal, and the periodic syncs and rescans will be taxing. Highly recommend getting cheap 1-2U servers with dual sockets and lots of cores/threads - multiprocessing goes a long way in doing the file hashing.
EDIT: I will add that I only use it on servers and not on any client/desktop machines, so I can't vouch for its use there.
I like it and IMO it does what it does well. But litestream can "Continuously stream SQLite changes" (pulled from https://litestream.io/, I've never heard of it before). It seems like that's litestream's killer feature, and I think syncthing would leave you wanting.
One case where you could make it work is if you sync'd across multiple computers but only used one at a time. I mean, it's still dangerous but it seems possible.
If not careful, I think you'll hit, particularly 1.2, 1.4.
We need ubiquitous private networks, such as wire guard, zerotier, or the buggy back-to-my-mac.
Think about it: mobile and desktop apps no longer have to upload things to some third-party service to share with yourself or a group of people. You could set up your own server of course but that requires technical expertise. The mass market could share data, sync, and communicate, straight from their devices, without any service hosting their data. It's just all on the private network.
There's probably a billion-dollar market there (or more) if someone can figure that out for a lay audience: virtually unlimited, encrypted private networks on-demand that require no setup.
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/wiki/Multiplayer#...
I thought it was interesting way for an open-source game to provide a way to find other players without relying on paid dedicated servers.
The idea of a network as a delineation of security or trust is inherently flawed and should be considered an anti-pattern. Reliance on "private" networks merely moves attacks to the network level, making a very large target and exposing more at once. Zero trust is where the whole world should be moving: explicit authorization added at a fine-grained level to each thing each user wants to access. But people haven't been exposed to this idea yet in their day to day lives, so they can't let go of the old paradigms of firewalls and networks.
Back to My Mac was awesome. When it worked.
I had about an 80% success rate with it, dragging my MacBook Air to about 30 countries around the world. It was tremendously useful at a time when storage was far more expensive and internal drives much smaller than they are today.
Often when it didn't work, I could just leave the computer running in the hotel while I went out and did touristy stuff, and by the time I came back things had sorted themselves out.