Syncthing is so great, I don’t have to deal with things like a FTP server, sending files to a cloud drive, connecting via USB, or similar. I just point syncthing to the folder I want to replicate and my PC has it immediately and receives new files as soon as I connect to a WiFi (because of my configuration), and then at the PC I can easily backup the files.
Syncthing and Warpinator take care of 99% of my file transfer needs. They’ve become essentials.
I have it on RPi with NAS and it automatically accept shares and announce to other devices
Syncthing has become one of my must use apps. I use it regularly to back up files from my phone to my PC.
It’s an incredible tool, don’t know why I thought only cloud providers could do cross-device file syncing in the past…
Fantastic application. I use it to sync my retro game saves: retroarch, dolphin, PCSX2, etc. Got it on the Steam Deck and Windows Desktop. They all sync with the NVIDIA Shield, which is always on. Works fantastically well and doesn’t seem to noticably impact the Deck’s battery life.
How do you do that?
if you stall your games to the same general folders or even if you don’t you just think all the folders contain the data that you want with the other machines to the right location and your games will synchronize between all your devices
When I tried stock Syncthing for Android it drained my battery very quickly. I use Syncthing-Fork which only checks for changes once an hour.
Can’t you specify this with the normal app?
I would never use it in battery mode, only plugged in, that is how I have my Swiftbackup, Pocket Casts and Feeder downloads schedule.
I honestly don’t remember, I just googled “Syncthing drains battery” or something, someone recommended Fork, it worked.
I (currently) only use it for my passwords and my music between my laptop and my phone, but it’s incredibly useful, even for just those 2 things.
Nice but what low quality post is that. Not even a “decentralized sync setup”, just an F-Droid link? I see this with Git* projects too. If its not yours, and you dont really have anythings special to say on it, maybe dont use it to get likes
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It is low effort but can spur some worthy discussion in the comments. Good post.
Great program, I use it to sync my music and movies/tv show folders to my phone.
It’s nice to see syncthing becoming more popular. It’s a great foss app that deserves more attention and can be used in so many contexts, replacing several proprietary and restrictive solutions
I use it to transfer large video files and 40000+ images from my phone to PC it transfer fast then normal copy between systems
I connect my PC and phone in tethering mode and open syncthing on both devices
I get 30mb+ per second transfer speed
That’s one of the advantages with p2p-ish networks, if you’re on the same network, devices can often disover each other and communicate directly, bypassing the bottleneck of an internet connection like traditional cloud services have .
The one issue I have with syncthing is the abundance of .sync-conflict files it will generate sometimes.
it happens if you change files on each device while offline, if you change then sync it is ok, if you change same file on multiple devices, that is a conflict as it can’t decide which file you want to keep
Yeah I noticed it only happened while offline, I don’t mind really, just something I gotta curate from time to time.
You can choose which to keep in the web interface. That’s a feature preventing data loss. You can choose to just delete all of these files but that would mean Syncthing might use the wrong data.
Oh man, this might change few things in my system, how did i not know about this earlier
What’s even cooler is that you can set up untrusted node(s) to store an E2EE copy of the data.
I use a cheap VPS like that so if none of my other nodes are online they can still sync to that VPS. Without the encryption key, no one can read the data in case of a compromised server or the VPS owner trying to snoop.
Which VPS do you use?
Currently I’m using CloudAtCost. It’s really shitty (to put it mildly), but it doesn’t cost a lot so I just use it for really unimportant stuff that I don’t really care if they shit the bed,
If I’m not mistake the default settings makes it so syncthing is not peer to peer but it involves their servers to pass the data. If anyone knows more about this please share.
You probably mean the relay servers. They are used in case your devices are behind a NAT and don’t have any ports forwarded. In that case, it would be impossible for devices on different networks to communicate over the internet, so the relay servers make the communication work. It’s not something to worry, since your data is encrypted when passing through it, but it can be disabled.
I think that’s only if you’re not on the same network
Basically just install it on all 3 devices, then identify which folders need to sync. And back up any saves you care about first, just in case.
First I set up the Shield. I think I just found it on the play store. Then set up each folder I wanted. SyncThing gives each shared folder a unique code, so when setting up folders on other devices you just enter that to let SyncThing know those 2 folders should sync. The Shield might not be ideal: a Raspberry Pi or something might be easier to work with than Android TV, but it still works.
On the Deck, you can just go to Desktop mode and find Syncthing in the repository. You don’t need to do any major changes like the Decoy loader or anything, but if I remember correctly it’s handy to have FlatSeal as well to grant the various programs permissions to each other’s folders. I also installed SyncThing GTK and added that as a non-Steam game, so even in Gaming mode I can access a GUI for it. I think that also made it easy to set up SyncThing to automatically start.
From there I chose to make a new directory, set that folder up on SyncThing, and then re-configured my emulators to save there. Retroarch, Dolphin, PCSX2. They all have different settings for it: PCSX2 sets up virtual Memory Cards, for example.
On Windows, I just followed the instructions to install SyncThing, then I also installed SyncThingy, which makes SyncThing run on startup. On a full desktop I found it easier to just use the existing folders for each program rather than create new ones and move them around.
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I’ve been using Resilio Sync for the same purposes. Syncthing is probably better.
Why not use the better product? Resilio was one of the inspirations IIRC. Syncthing became really good a while ago, I never had data loss with it after they 1.0d it.
I always had a hard time wrapping my head around the setup. I mostly use Nextcloud for sync now.
Interestingly I’ve found Syncthing far far easier to setup than Nextcloud :D
