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Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

I had to stop using it after loads of conflict files piled up over the years in my notes folder.

I'm trying to switch to WebDAV for notes. Considering Caddy+WebDAV[0] or Peergos[1] or SeaweedFS[2], but not Next/OwnCloud.

Is still consider using Syncthing for other files types.

[0] https://whhone.com/posts/webdav-syncthing/

[1] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3APeergos%2FPeergos%20webda...

[2] https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/blob/master/weed/comm...

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I had similar issues years ago and it was frustrating. What I do now is have syncthing on a 'server' that is always on and everything syncs to the server and not between each device. That reduced my conflicts by 99%. Another issue I had was accidentally deleting a folder and having it deleted off of all my devices.

To solve that issue I have my server do ZFS snapshots on my syncthing folder, which makes for easy recovery. With those 2 things being done, I can't say enough good things about syncthing. Compared to nextcloud it is almost maintenance free.

Why not just use rsync -a periodically over an encrypted ssh connection? It works across Mac/Linux etc. and is just as efficient, no?

If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script to watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it happene.

You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Not sure why this would be easier or better

FTP is not encrypted. Unless you use SFTP maybe. (I wrote an SFTP and FTP-over-SSH client in Visual Basic like 20 yesrs ago lol).

And even then, you miss out on all the optimizations with prolly trees and other goodness that rsync has.

No, sorry, that solution sucks. CVS? That’s super outdated.

It's a reference to the infamous dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Anyways, if you're at the grocery store and you need to see your shopping list, and you're happy with your current workflow of opening up Termux and typing `rsync -avrsomgwtfbbq me@server/shopping-list.txt` with your thumbs, then by all means keep doing that! For the rest of us, there's Syncthing.

Yeah but on the substance, none of your countrexamples make sense

SyncThing doesnt actually have an iOS client that syncs reliably. I tried some, when I was test driving it and Resilio Sync and others.

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045

On your phone you’d probably just visit a website, and access your server via HTTP.

> If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script to watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it happene.

I use a tool that does that, it's called Syncthing.

Yeah but if you’re just syncing everything to and from a server anyway, why bother with it?

Plus, rsync -a never deletes files.

Plus why doesn't sync thing support rsync protocols anyway? It's not like it couldn't, right?

Because you want syncthing to delete files more often than not. When you want the reverse, it's a single property on the shared folder (ignoreDelete), feel free to set it.

Is that ignoreDelete a Syncthing setting or something on the file system?

Syncthing setting, per shared directory: https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html

I sync files across Windows, FreeBSD, Linux and Android. Your solution wouldn't work for me as easily as Syncthing.

They're not the same thing. rsync is unidirectional, and only between two endpoints. One side is always overwritten by the other side.

syncthing is bidirectional, syncing changes in either direction, and supports syncing any number of clients, not just two.

Watching and syncing immediately - yes, that's what syncthing does. Why reinvent it with something worse?

That isn't going to handle possibly conflicting changes from more than one source.

Syncthing has staggered versioning that keeps several versions at different timepoints this may have solved that issue.

Conflict files are good. It means you changed the same file in multiple locations and Syncthing didn't overwrite or delete any of them.

Much like forest fires, only you can prevent conflict files.

Nah. They're not alone. For me, syncthing would just randomly decide an updated file conflicted; I had two computers and a smartphone and was pretty careful about this stuff.

It was its only fault - but it was easier to figure out what the actual most-current file was.

Nextcloud does the same thing occasionally, and it's not intuitive at all trying to figure out which one is the proper one to keep.

There was a bug in the android client a while back that was causing that it is much better now.

> I had to stop using it after loads of conflict files piled up over the years in my notes folder.

SyncThing is still still _loads_ better than Next/Own-Cloud unless you also need the extra baggage those two bring.

Having said that, "conflict-sync" files are my current issue.

I have several devices that sync to a local central device and a remote central device and I'm struggling to determine if the "conflicts" that are _not_ conflicts are because of this "dual-honed" approach or not.

I've had to reset it multiple times due to the same sort of issue. There doesn't seem to be a good way to resolve conflicts; at least, none that reliably works.

You have to ensure there's continuity - at least something online and connected at all times, to ensure that the system can know and have distributed the latest version of the files.

I just have it running on my desktop, and at this point, the system's been running for nearly 6 years, and the file conflicts are rare. They only happen when I e.g. do edits on my laptop offline, then go home and do more edits on my desktop before letting my laptop sync.

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