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!

  • wittless@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I have a site to site VPN between my house and my mother’s house. I keep a raspberry pi at her house with a 2TB drive running syncthing. My photo library and important documents sync to her house as an offsite backup in case my house ever burned to the ground.

    as far as syncing files between PC and laptop, I would think ownCloud would be better suited for that.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      I’m currently building the same setup, the long-term goal being a Crashplan-type solution (back when they had a feature where you could backup to your friend’s devices).

      Having a large family, there a many geographically distributed locations for us all to use.

      As for OwnCloud, ST is far simpler to setup. Granted, it’s not nearly as flexible. I do use it to keep all our laptops and phones “backed up” to a desktop that runs Crashplan and Backblaze.

      Edit: With ST that VPN isn’t even required. It will sync, encrypted, over most any connection.

      • wittless@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        because synching runs all the time. any change that I make is nearly immediately updated offsite. and if you think that is my only backup of my photos, you would be wrong :-) This is only a “if I lost all my physical possessions” type backup, not an “oops, I am a dummy and deleted something I shouldn’t have” backup. I have multiple snapshot backups and also run incremental backups every hour. Storage is so cheap any more that I don’t hesitate to have 5 backups of the REALLY important stuff. Most of my server storage is also raid5 in case of hardware failure. I have pushover set up to check for disk failures and push alerts to my phone if one is ever detected.

          • wittless@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            my primary laptop is a Mac, but my main server is a proxmox host running many containers for various things. one is a samba server that holds my Time Machine backups.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        ST has stupid-simple clients for every OS. Rsync doesn’t (though it’s more capable in my opinion).

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Working for a sip provider.

    We used syncthing to sync sound files between sip servers. Things like voicemail, call recordings, hold music, menu options.

  • aluminium@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 years ago

    I don’t know if these are uncommon but I have a few cool usecases besides the regular 1:1 folder syncing, maybe someone else finds them useful.

    Also you should know that the way I have all of this setup is that I have a container that hosts a bunch of SMB Network drives and a syncthing container that stores all of the fodlers on that drive. Having them also easily accessible through smb is great when I just wanna quickly copy something or back the folders up.

    So here are some of my maybe unorthodoz usecases :

    • Music - As a fan of offline music, I have it setup that music I acquire gets synced onto the server and re-encoded as opus through a script into a second folder which then through syncthing gets sent out my mobile devices. There I rather have smaller files than lossless quality. Said script also sorts the music into folders based on artist and album metadata.
    • I also sync my Newpipe Subscriptions between phones (unfortunately by manually exporting my settings and re-importing them)

    I also used to have a setup that would sync Minecraft Bedrock and Stardew Valley saves between devices (where Windows and Android saves are compatible) but Android 11 introduced a stupid restriction that prevents synching from accessing the the saves are located on Android.

  • sCrUM_MASTER@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Currently just use it for backing up KeePass and uni files across two laptops and a phone.

    I think it would be fun to use it for storing DRM free games (like from GOG) and sharing them with friends. Create a big dump of games and share them with each other. Maybe even share save files in games where that’s common.

  • lue3099@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I use syncthing to sync the sysvol folder between my two samba ad domain controllers.

  • cmhe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.