Here's my problem: I want to keep my digital data safe. I've lost data in the past even when I still had physical access to my devices — so what if I lose the devices themselves? That’s why I want to keep extra copies of my data, ideally more than one. I also want it to be automated — manual backups are way too much of a hassle.
Sounds simple, right? Just use a cloud service provider to sync your files. Well, I have several problems with that:
Privacy: I don’t trust anyone with my data — they can and will look at it. And if you think, “It’s fine, I have nothing to hide,” you’re missing the point.
Security: If someone gets access to my online account, they get access to everything — my data, my identity, my life. I don’t like tying everything to online accounts.
Data Integrity: I just don’t trust that my data won’t be lost or deleted. I lost a bunch of notes using Google Keep a while back and couldn’t recover them. I didn’t like how the situation felt out of my control.
Cost: I either pay a monthly fee or get stuck with limited storage. I’m not a fan of subscription services, no matter how useful they might be.
Cool idea, but I'm no massive nerd — or at least I'd rather not live like one. How hard can it be to just sync some files across computers? I don't want to dedicate an entire computer or VPS for my ~5 GiB of documents and media.
Yes they did! Enter Syncthing — one of the best pieces of software created for us mere mortals to sync our files seamlessly and easily.
You just install it on two devices and connect them. Add some folders to the sync list. As long as Syncthing is running and both devices are online, they will sync the files between them. If they’re on the same local network, they’ll use that; otherwise, they’ll use a Syncthing relay server.
BE AWARE: By default, if you delete a file on one device, it will be deleted on the other once they sync. You can adjust this behavior through the advanced settings in the GUI.
There are official clients for everything except iOS. But if you're on iOS, check out this blog post for an unofficial client that doesn’t suck.
Happy syncing!