this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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What are you non-obvious, maybe strange usecases of Syncthing?

For example syncing the media library with your friend or maybe your entire /home/user folder between your PC and laptop?

I'd love to hear your ideas!

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[–] wittless@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I have a site to site VPN between my house and my mother's house. I keep a raspberry pi at her house with a 2TB drive running syncthing. My photo library and important documents sync to her house as an offsite backup in case my house ever burned to the ground.

as far as syncing files between PC and laptop, I would think ownCloud would be better suited for that.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

as far as syncing files between PC and laptop, I would think ownCloud would be better suited for that.

The main purpose of Syncthing is syncing files between two or more computers and it does an excellent job of that.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True, keeping a not-necessarily-synced repository of files is more own/nextcloud's thing.

[–] bastion@feddit.nl 1 points 11 months ago

This comes off as a sick burn.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm currently building the same setup, the long-term goal being a Crashplan-type solution (back when they had a feature where you could backup to your friend's devices).

Having a large family, there a many geographically distributed locations for us all to use.

As for OwnCloud, ST is far simpler to setup. Granted, it's not nearly as flexible. I do use it to keep all our laptops and phones "backed up" to a desktop that runs Crashplan and Backblaze.

Edit: With ST that VPN isn't even required. It will sync, encrypted, over most any connection.

[–] mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ok, why syncthing and not rsync? Also, duplication should not be threated as backup.

[–] wittless@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

because synching runs all the time. any change that I make is nearly immediately updated offsite. and if you think that is my only backup of my photos, you would be wrong :-) This is only a "if I lost all my physical possessions" type backup, not an "oops, I am a dummy and deleted something I shouldn't have" backup. I have multiple snapshot backups and also run incremental backups every hour. Storage is so cheap any more that I don't hesitate to have 5 backups of the REALLY important stuff. Most of my server storage is also raid5 in case of hardware failure. I have pushover set up to check for disk failures and push alerts to my phone if one is ever detected.

[–] mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, okay! thanks for the clarification. What are you using for incremental backups?

[–] wittless@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

my primary laptop is a Mac, but my main server is a proxmox host running many containers for various things. one is a samba server that holds my Time Machine backups.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

It can be if the off-site duplicate has automatic snapshots.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

ST has stupid-simple clients for every OS. Rsync doesn't (though it's more capable in my opinion).