What are you non-obvious, maybe strange usecases of Syncthing?

For example syncing the media library with your friend or maybe your entire /home/user folder between your PC and laptop?

I’d love to hear your ideas!

  • zaphod@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Echoing other comments, my backup strategy for all our devices is: Syncthing to replicate data to my NAS, restic to generate encrypted backups, and then cron+rclone to offsite those backups to Google Drive.

    I absolutely love this setup.

    1. It works anywhere. Syncthing takes care of firewall punching and all that so whether I’m at home or on the road, I know the data is being replicated correctly.

    2. It’s immediate. Syncthing doesn’t run on some schedule. It’s constantly replicating so I know at minimum there’s a copy of all my data if something catastrophic happens.

    3. It’s private, encrypted, and entirely in my control.

    4. The setup is built of composable parts that can each be understood, modified, and debugged easily.

    Normally I’m a little cautious about rolling my own infrastructure for something critical like backups, but this setup is so simple and robust that I just don’t worry about it.

    Other use cases I’ve come up with:

    1. I use Paperless as a DMS. It has a watch folder for automatically ingesting documents. I set up Genius Scan + Syncthing on my phone, syncing scans to the Paperless drop folder, so I can scan from my phone and automatically upload to Paperless without any additional app. Just scan and off it goes.

    2. For a while I was playing Subnautica on my Steam Deck and my gaming rig. Subnautica doesn’t support the Steam Cloud so I used Syncthing to replicate the save data across my gaming devices.

    Not particularly weird or outlandish, but of course I also use Syncthing to replicate my keepass database across devices as well.

    I also have a personal wiki of Markdown notes that I sync between my laptop and phone using Syncthing.

    Oh, and I use it to replicate my Calibre library between my laptop and my calibre-web server.

    Basically it’s my swiss army knife of “I have data over here, I need to get that data over there” and it’s amazing!