Syncthing

I’ve used Syncthing before but I never appreciated its purpose until I’ve used it seriously lately.

Ever since I fixed by Synology NAS' double-NAT issues and boosted my overall storage capacity to double digits, I’ve slowly started to consider hosting my own storage service and detach myself from cloud storage. It’s not as consistent and reliable (I mean, it’s backed by large companies with dedicated IT staff and multiple levels of redundancy), but it is significantly cheaper and reliable enough. Maybe I’ll write more about this in a different post.

Okay, so Syncthing is great because I realized that it’s a good way to keep my mobile (Android) devices in sync with my NAS and my MacBook Pro. It’s tiresome to synchronize Android through adb pull and I wanted the process to be automatic, so Syncthing actually fixes this issue. Add in the benefits of a mesh-style storage network that can work locally (or so I’ve heard) and remotely (through community relays and discovery via Internet), it’s a good way to at least keep the common files in sync.

I wish it handled one-way transfers better though. It works, but it complains that the receiving end is off-sync when local changes were made. (i.e., I wanted the receiving end to work as an archive, and have the sending end clear up its files to free up storage space).

So yeah, Syncthing is very good to mesh-sync your own files with multiple devices you own.