92
Syncthing alternatives
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
92 points (96.9% liked)
Selfhosted
46672 readers
1506 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
First and foremost Syncthing is not a 'backup' utility. Using it for backup is not at all recommended. Especially if you are dealing with Android or Raspberry pi, because the way clock / time works in these systems are pretty weird and create sync conflicts. So don't.
Now to the solution. For backup, use a proper backup solution like Kopia. Modern solutions support browsing the snapshots created as backups. Also creating periodic snapshots ensures better redundancy and better chance for disaster recovery.
Now if you will not use it for backup, take a look at 'Round Sync' available in F-Droid. It's an application built around the execptionally good app, 'rclone'. It is some what similar to Syncthing, but designed in a very different way. Also it is more difficult to configure to copy the files to PC.
I also wanted to mention that I have used Syncthing for many heavy lifting jobs and never faced issues with it. It is a feature complete app, with the philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it perfectly. So if you run into any issues, do reach out to forums or devs. They will definitely help you.
Curious about your point about time conflicts. Doesn't syncthing look at the change on your machine compared to the 'canonical' list also stored on your machine? So even if the timestamp is different, syncthing still detects the change, and the only problem is if the file is simultaneously modified on another machine before being propagated - which would be a conflict anyway.
It didn't work like that for me. I must admit I didn't dig deep to clearly see what is the problem. So my setup had a Windows Pc, a Raspberry Pi 5, and an Android phone, sharing a folder which had notes.
Whenever I save any changes in Windows machine, the android used gets updated without much issue, but the Raspberry Pi caused conflicts. When looked at the time stamps they were different and it looked to me like the Raspberry Pi 5 Syncthing is sending the old file as new one, because of the save time.
It read somewhere the issue is with how time is handled in Rasberry Pi. So I disabled the Raspberry Pi Syncthing and went on, because that was not really needed.
Huh, interesting. I'll bear that in mind - I don't like the idea of a system clock error causing an old file to overwrite a new one!
From what I see, kopia is for the desktop. Unless I didn't see something, it is not available for android, which is where more important to have backup in my case
Aah my bad.. I was half asleep. What I meant was use Round Sync / Syncthing to copy files to pc and then use Kopia to backup. Round Sync can do one direction copying, so source files are not corrupted.
That is something I can totally do after I figure out this syncthing thing. Probably will use Borg backup but same principle applies