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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives do people like these days for "just sync/backup a folder"? I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can

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Syncthing. It's amazing. I use it across my NixOS workstation, M1 Macbook, home lab server (acting as an "always on" folder to always fetch syncs), and my Steam Deck.

If you use Nix it's really easy to setup: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/nixos/...

> I would really like to avoid self-managing something if I can

Unless there's some managed syncthing service I don't know about. I want to learn Nix for this even less than I want to manage it by hand on a VPS

You don't host it. It just talks to each of your machines peer-to-peer. Just run it on each machine and it works like magic.

I would like something on the cloud in case of physical disaster. That's the main reason I use Dropbox, to be honest

It keeps multiple copies of your data on whatever machine is running syncthing. So if you lose data on one machine, it's still safe on another.

Sure if all machines go at once, you're screwed. But I'm not too worried about that, personally. If you have something you absolutely can't lose just stick it in a Backblaze bucket and use syncthing for the rest.

Backblaze is cheap and has both an API and web interface.

> Backblaze is cheap and has both an API and web interface.

Yep I think Backblaze for backup paired with SyncThing for syncing is probably about as good as it gets. Admittedly my needs for syncing aren't crazy but it's worked well for me.

Having a third machine in the mix is pretty great, I can move from my office upstairs to my laptop downstairs and pick up right where I left off. Sharing Nix configuration between the two machines means that is always in sync too.

It keeps copies on each machine independently, if you change the default behavior to keep those copies, to be clear.

And Syncthing repeatedly and very explicitly warns that it is not a backup system, and you should have a separate backup running as well.

I've never seen these warnings, and I just checked their homepage:

"Run it on your desktop computers and synchronize them with your server for backup."

I could swear it used to be more prominent, but: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/faq.html?highlight=backup#i...

Yeah, I agree with this. For the lay person it's not going to work for backup, you need something else to checkpoint the files. Versions, ZFS snapshots (what I do), git, bash scripts + Backblaze, whatever. Lots of people don't want to mess with this, which is what Dropbox used to solve for. Now you're constantly barraged with whatever new methods they are experimenting with to monetize. But we know that, so I regress.

For those who don't mind a little extra work (I argue Backblaze is almost no work using their Web UI), syncthing is a really great solution.

I personally found the entire syncthing process convoluted and over complicated to the point of giving up several times before I actually got it working. Am I remembering correctly that you need to allow every machine to sync to every other machine individually?

No. I don't know whether my setup is typical, but I have one machine that new machines have designated as an "introducer," so each machine eventually learns about the existence of the others. As for syncing itself, it just works. I have a $4/month virtual server running Syncthing, so every machine that's online always has at least one to connect to. Changes typically propagate through that one. But before I went that route, data eventually got where it needed to go.

I do the same thing and have bash scripts that run on my server to ingest data I find useful. I use org-roam and org-daily to keep a journal in Emacs, and text from across the web or my life just arrives that is important for that day.

Examples: my likes on Twitter, highlights on the web (highlight something, right click "Import to Readwise", it downloads into Emacs via syncthing), calendar events, etc. I'm always collecting stuff that I can reference later without much effort after the initial setup. It just works.

Same here, and I don’t really like the networking part on their end.

It makes more sense if it’s combined with for example wireguard

Convoluted and over-complicated, and prone to syncing issues and latency that are extremely difficult to resolve without a lot of context, yeah.

Much of it is that it's a truly distributed system, so each computer you connect is untrusted - it doesn't fit well with use-cases of people migrating from Dropbox. It can be made to work, without all that much trouble, but it's based on a very different set of assumptions and it shows.

(I say this as a mostly very happy user of it, and I do recommend it. But you're not going to be successful in migrating your non-tech-enthusiast friends or family)

Sync.com is basically Dropbox but with e2e encryption, and about the same price. I switched to it about a year ago and I’ve had no problems at all. I don’t understand why I almost never hear about it on HN.

Syncthing might work for some but it’s not a drop-in replacement for Dropbox at all, you have to come up with your own cloud storage. I tried it for a couple of months but I found it a bit confusing and unpredictable. Felt like I could easily permanently lose data by messing with the config when my brain isn’t 100%. The peace of mind just wasn’t there for me. It felt like a cluster of footguns.

This might be exactly what I was looking for!

Do we know anything about trustworthiness/security audits/etc? Would just like to get a general feeling of trust, especially since I haven't heard of it before

The usual culprits. Google drive, iCloud, or one drive. By design these probably are the most well integrated and secure products.

For backup I use CloudBerry + Amazon Glacier. I don't need to sync though, just backup.

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