153 pointsposted 2 years ago
by EchoForge

Item id: 41690701

35 Comments

evanjrowley

2 years ago

I had to stop using it after loads of conflict files piled up over the years in my notes folder.

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...

soupbowl

2 years ago

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.

ta988

2 years ago

Syncthing has staggered versioning that keeps several versions at different timepoints this may have solved that issue.

EGreg

2 years ago

Why not just use rsync -a periodically over an encrypted ssh connection? It works across Mac/Linux etc. and is just as efficient, no?

If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script to watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it happene.

aniviacat

2 years ago

> If you really want to be fancy, you can deploy a script to watch files for changes and do rsync immediately when it happene.

I use a tool that does that, it's called Syncthing.

EGreg

2 years ago

Yeah but if you’re just syncing everything to and from a server anyway, why bother with it?

Plus, rsync -a never deletes files.

ta2234234242

2 years ago

Plus why doesn't sync thing support rsync protocols anyway? It's not like it couldn't, right?

LeoPanthera

2 years ago

They're not the same thing. rsync is unidirectional, and only between two endpoints. One side is always overwritten by the other side.

syncthing is bidirectional, syncing changes in either direction, and supports syncing any number of clients, not just two.

Watching and syncing immediately - yes, that's what syncthing does. Why reinvent it with something worse?

dmd

2 years ago

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.

EGreg

2 years ago

Not sure why this would be easier or better

FTP is not encrypted. Unless you use SFTP maybe. (I wrote an SFTP and FTP-over-SSH client in Visual Basic like 20 yesrs ago lol).

And even then, you miss out on all the optimizations with prolly trees and other goodness that rsync has.

No, sorry, that solution sucks. CVS? That’s super outdated.

fallingsquirrel

2 years ago

It's a reference to the infamous dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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.

EGreg

2 years ago

Yeah but on the substance, none of your countrexamples make sense

SyncThing doesnt actually have an iOS client that syncs reliably. I tried some, when I was test driving it and Resilio Sync and others.

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/syncthing-for-ios/16045

On your phone you’d probably just visit a website, and access your server via HTTP.

soupbowl

2 years ago

I sync files across Windows, FreeBSD, Linux and Android. Your solution wouldn't work for me as easily as Syncthing.

boring_twenties

2 years ago

That isn't going to handle possibly conflicting changes from more than one source.

LeoPanthera

2 years ago

Conflict files are good. It means you changed the same file in multiple locations and Syncthing didn't overwrite or delete any of them.

Much like forest fires, only you can prevent conflict files.

KennyBlanken

2 years ago

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.

ta988

2 years ago

There was a bug in the android client a while back that was causing that it is much better now.

baby_souffle

2 years ago

> 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.

Filligree

2 years ago

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.

generalizations

2 years ago

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.

zelphirkalt

2 years ago

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!

aborsy

2 years ago

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.

kristjank

2 years ago

SyncThing has been the only piece of open-source software which I've fire-and-forget installed and it's working indefinitely.

edarchis

2 years ago

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.

tetris11

2 years ago

Yep, good software and the dev (nutomic) is the main Lemmy coder, meaning the fediverse is in good hands.

bdjsiqoocwk

2 years ago

Seconding the sentiment <3

yownie

2 years ago

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.

naming_the_user

2 years ago

You can use SSH forwarding.

ssh -L 12345:localhost:8384 remoteserver

Keep the ssh session open, maybe “watch date” or something

Go to localhost:12345 in your browser

Bosh

danparsonson

2 years ago

> ...a good way to administer config's on a machine not local to me.

If you can't access the web interface, is Wireguard an option? That's how I do mine.

icelancer

2 years ago

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.

lmaoguy

2 years ago

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.

magicalhippo

2 years ago

I find Resilio to want to fall back to relaying, even though ports are open and if I restart I get a direct connection immediately.

Would be nice if I could tell it to never use relay servers.