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Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

Syncthing is under my "want to like" list but I gave up on it. I'm a one person show who just wants to sync a few dozen markdown files across a few laptops and a phone. Every time I'd run it I'd invariably end up with conflict files. It got to the point where I was spending more time merging diffs than writing. How it could do that with just one person running it I have no idea.

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That should not happen. I use it a lot and never had this issue, there maybe is something wrong about your setup.

A good idea is to have it on an always-on server and add your share as an encrypted one (like you set the password on all your apps but not on the server); this pretty much results in a dropbox-like experience since you have a central place to sync even when your other devices are not online

My Syncthing experience matches Oxodao's. Over years with >10k files / 100 gb, I've only ever had conflicts when I actually made conflicting simultaneous changes.

I use it on my phone (configured to only sync on WiFi), laptop (connected 99% of the time), and server (up 100% of the time).

The always-up server/laptop as a "master node" are probably key.

That is good advice from both of you. I knew it has to be me because it's honestly one of the most successful and popular open source tools I've worked with. I think I should've made that more clear in my original comment.

The conflicts come of course when you edit a file on 2 devices before Syncthing had a chance to sync them. I mostly solved this by running Snycthing on a server as well as on clients, so that at least the server is always online, as a point of synchronization. So now I only get conflict files, if somehow my phone doesn't have Internet and I edit files on my phone, which happens very rarely.

I had this when I had a windows system in the mix. Windows handles case differently in filenames than linux and macOS, and it caused conflicts.

Same. I don't know why so many people like syncthing.

I don't think that there is some good alternative to open source syncthing ,the way syncthing just does syncing no

Let me know if you know of any alternative which have helped you but I haven't tried syncthing but I have heard good things about it overall so I feel like I like it already even if I haven't tried it I guess.

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