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!
A folder for backgrounds, shared between gf and i.
We can change each other’s currently active background.
Also, synchronization of game assets - i save a template, and it almost immediately becomes available in her game.
Sync (one-way) from our phones to an always on tablet in the house - the screensaver is a photo gallery so now we actually SEE those photos we take.
Just update the exclusion list (on the tablet) every now and again to ignore older photos (ie 2023-10*) and it keeps them fresh.
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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s private, encrypted, and entirely in my control.
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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:
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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.
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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!
How does syncthing know what to upload to paperless watch dir if paperless keeps deleting the files after ingesting them?
That’d exactly what you want! When the file initially lands in the sync folder, Syncthing sends it to paperless. Paperless ingests it, deletes it, and it disappears from my phone, now stored in paperless. Exactly what I need.
If I wanted the files to stay on the phone I’d set up the phone as Send Only and the paperless side as Recieved Only.
Oh you delete them from the phone too, ok that makes sense.
I don’t delete them from the phone (because they’re also in a different app I used since before Paperless) so that’s a bit of a dilemma. I’ll have to think about it better.
I use syncthing to sync the sysvol folder between my two samba ad domain controllers.
I mod my games on my PC and sync it to my SteamDeck. I also sync the save files back and fourth, to continue playing on different devices. Mostly non-steam games.
I also sync my eBook collection to my eink reader with syncthing.
Everything is also mirrored to my always-on NAS, so syncing always works.
