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Comment by dlyons | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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