I Love Syncthing

I just discovered syncthing the other day. I work on files at home and at work sometimes. I of course, use dropbox. I've discussed storage limits with other services before, like what I encountered with Dropbox. As I discussed in Back Ups, storage limits can be a significant concern for me when choosing a syncing solution. This relates to what I discussed in Securing Things, where I shared my thoughts on password security and online presence. Related to what I discussed in Securing Things, having control over your data is crucial for maintaining your digital independence and security online.

I set up my own nextcloud, but it was a bit finicky for me, and never seemed to work quite smoothly with my Arch Linux set up and Ubuntu server working with S3.

Then I worked on rsync, but for some reason I don’t care to find out right now, I can’t seem to ssh into my computer… I am sure it is a simple oversight but I don’t care to work on that right now. Plus I don’t want to start bothering with cron jobs and what not.

Next, I set up Dragon Disk. It works nice, but then I end up saving things on s3 and have to pay for that. The back up is nice but not really neccessary. On top of that, I have to run it manually. And I had to configure both ‘up’ and ‘down’ directions.

Then I searched for syncing solutions on the Arch linux pages. I discovered syncthing here. I had it set up in minutes. To confess, I actually could not get the systemctl working properly but part of that is because I just turn it on in the openbox autostart file. Much easier than tracking down the systemctl files and paths and all that fuss.

I had to enter the codes for each of my computers but that only took one trip to home and back. Then presto! Up and running. Now I can sync one or more (as many as I like) folders on my computers, and no limits on data or amounts or anything. Now I can easily get the two out of three minimum copies of my files to ensure they will exist regardless of most disasters.

Open source, free, highly encrypted and private.

I gave them $10 of my own money as thanks.

Nice.