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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Since I started using Syncthing, I have found many cases of "just make a new folder and share it with selection of other devices" and now, that I am running it on a server, it is also always online, ready to share with any device that comes online. It is just so neat and handy!
Syncthing is probably the best sync software on market right now in my view. I have had very positive experience with it.
I have an always on device that runs various applications including syncthing. Works great and sync is fast. Like send a movie from a computer to phone, and it gets there fast.
I have started to use encrypted folders (beta feature). If you have a VPS, this might be a useful feature for you.
I like that the transfers are peer to peer, and syncthing has been very secure so far.
I use it on so many platforms and even sometimes in three-way like my Obsidian vault that syncs between my laptop, my phone and my tablet. I barely ever had any conflict. Amazing software.
I've had the intention of testing it out for YEARS and finally got around to it last week or so. Really pleasantly surprised how well the NAT punching / relay servers handle keeping machines synced.
I wish I had tried it all those years ago. I wish excluding directories was a little more intuitive and there was a good way to administer config's on a machine not local to me. Maybe over SSH, I'm still learning.
This system works extremely well unless you have a LOT of small files (like 200-400k or more). Then, unfortunately, it stalls/breaks in very weird ways.
We had to move on and go with more manual synchronization methods like using robocopy and so forth.
It's unfortunate given how awesome SyncThing + SyncTrazor works on Windows Servers. But I cannot recommend it highly enough if you don't have a system with a huge number of individual files - it works very well.
I found that it struggled with larger data sets. I have a directory that is 70TB and about 300,000+ files and unfortunately, it just can't handle that. Resilio (formerly BitTorrent Sync) handles it nicely and they just opened up to allow home users better access to it.
syncthing automtically connects with bunch of external servers automatically. Relays/discovery servers/stun etc. You can disable but they are enabled by default. They connect on first run and before you get a chance to disable - atleast on android. Everything may be encrypted but I still prefer to not connect to external servers
I've had to stop using Syncthing as my primary means of file syncing due to either Android 14's scoped storage or the way this OEM implemented it. At least it still works on my backup Android 10 device.
I would like to reflect on all the positive sentiments here. I have been using it for years and I rarely have to look at or think about it more than once every two months. Even when I do need to look at it, it's just to realize I filled some drive and that's why it's not synchronizing anymore.
I have no issues day-to-day and it's relatively easy to set up.
I haven't played with the zero trust encrypted folder syncing yet but I will eventually :p
I'm running it on Linux and Android but I started out with it on Windows.
Thanks for the reminder about this software. I don't think I've donated in a couple years now.
I recently set it up for syncing files between Windows and Mac. That results in many sync errors because of differences in allowed special characters in the file names. Anyone having recommendations for avoiding that? Thanks.
Huge fan. Been using it for years with very few issues across Win10, MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu / PopOS, Steam Deck and even Quest 3. Fire and forget. Like Tailscale, don’t know what I’d do without it.
I had a small issue with Syncthing-Fork on Android. The app defaults to having silent notifications so when I shared a new folder from other computer I didn't noticed it on my Android device and I thought it wasn't working because notifications are the only way you can accept and configure new share. Nothing else shows up even though I had the app opened all the time I was doing that.
Syncthing is a wonderful open source project that I thoroughly enjoyed using when my mobile device was on Android. Everything I needed was synced, all the time. Great performance, too. And it was really easy to set up syncing of a particular folder with random people for various projects.
I switched to an iPhone for greater privacy, and was crushed to find Syncthing doesn't support iOS.
I see that 5-6 years later they still don't. Sad, given the iPhone has a majority market share in the US (60%).
I use Nextcloud and it's....okay. There's some weirdness where files I've specified should be always available somehow aren't, but luckily the keepass client keeps an internal/backup copy and is smart enough to open that.
iCloud is just...a rolling dumpster fire. And easily the most frustrating thing about it is that there's no way to set up an iPhone without it immediately trying to sync everything to iCloud, like say, your iMessage encryption keys...
There's a 3rd-party commercial app that brings Syncthing to iOS [1]. It's essentially a paid app, but periodically they'll release TestFlight versions as betas.
> I see that 5-6 years later they still don't. Sad, given the iPhone has a majority market share in the US (60%).
What goes around, comes around. Apple knows they make it hard on developers that want to make the iPhone behave like a normal computer. Same as any Apple platform, you pay the price premium for compatible software and not the other way around. Magic solutions don't manifest on developer-hostile platforms like that, and Apple makes sure of it. After all, they profit off every solution sold on their problem marketplace.
> there's no way to set up an iPhone without it immediately trying to sync everything to iCloud, like say, your iMessage encryption keys...
So much for "greater privacy" then, huh? Or... do we still think this is a negligible fact?
I switched back to android for syncthing, totally worth it. I am on a galaxy s24, the battery life is not great compared to my last iPhone, and the camera takes poor photos, but other than that everything is better.
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...