Syncthing, own your keys, own your data.
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing
Android phone app
https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android
I take a photo on my phone it's on my server & desktop in seconds. Files on my computers are easily accessible from my phone almost instantly. No big tech, totally under my control. It's a great project.
I personally use Nextcloud for stuff is this.
I'm surprised it doesn't. It's available on Umbrel.
Syncthing & Nextcloud aren't 💯 the same. Syncthing just keeps folders in sync on multiple devices. Nextcloud tries to replace a lot of other features. I've tried both, but find syncthing a better for my personal use case.
I like the whole ecosystem replacement that Nextcloud offers.
Nextcloud is syncing filr folders across five devices for me right now, but then it also syncs contacts, calendars, tasks, browser bookmarks, plus much more across all those devices.
We've had it for a couple of years, it's on the Community Registry: https://marketplace.start9.com/syncthing
That said, we don't really recommend it. Syncthing is not really a server application. It mostly a way for clients to synchronize with one another without a server. Once you introduce a server through which all clients can synchronize, it is largely obsoleted. There are certainly still use cases for it
Cool man.
Immich for Photos is also amazing for self-custody.
I tried that and found the phone app buggy. With syncthing my phone files are synced to my desktop, and backed up automatically there. I find this easier and less trouble.
beware of metadata leaks. It's not easy to make it "private"
Syncthing runs on computers you own, not a centralized server. I'm not sure where metadata would be leaking, considering communication is encrypted.
You're broadcasting it.
If you're worried about your IP address being known disable global discovery and have your devices on a VPN. Wireguard is good for this.
I just said to beware.
also I use syncthing
It's a valid but trivial concern compared to the spying one deals with on gdrive, OneDrive, etc.
Thankfully there are solutions. People who are capable of using syncthing probably already have a VPN set up anyways IMHO 😂
given the dostr DM discussions I just found it worth mentioning.
also, what's VPN 🤪
My experience with syncthing was pretty awful actually. If i deleted something, it deleted from every device, if i added something on desktop, it automatically took storage on my phone. Which were both the opposite of what i wanted. I wanted to leverage storage on my desktop to offload it from my phone, but still have it accessible.
Maybe there were some settings i could change with syncthing, but I lost some files almost immediately because of the destructive sync function without realizing.
It's certainly the closest thing to what I'd love to have however. But there are some major things that are hugely under-appreciated possibilities that it doesn't seem interested in building for.
Yes my use case is keeping files synced between devices, which makes it perfect. I guess it's kind of in the name though.
With great power comes great responsibility.
You can absolutely set it up as you describe / want to, using "send only" and/or "receive only" folders.
I've been using it forever and I use it for pretty much anything. Granted, my setup is a bit involved, but it works fantastically well (and I never lost files).
Interesting I’ll dig back into it and look at how it works more closely. I’d be curious how you use your setup as well.
Maybe we could’ve used syncthing to build what we are doing, but at this point it doesn’t really matter because we’ve solved the file syncing part and it’s about the things we are building alongside it and the UX that I think will set ours apart. There’s just so much complexity in these kinds of tools that seems totally unnecessary. And some hugely missed opportunities as well, imo.
But we will see, I’ll give syncthing another good look though and see what I came up with do with it.
