{"id":6283,"date":"2016-11-01T04:51:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T03:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/?p=6283"},"modified":"2016-11-01T04:51:26","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T03:51:26","slug":"syncthing-some-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/2016\/11\/syncthing-some-recommendations\/","title":{"rendered":"Syncthing: some notes and recommendations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/syncthing\/syncthing\/\">Syncthing is a open source<\/a> synchronization application. It&#8217;s a replacement for the closed source <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Resilio_Sync\">Bittorrent Sync<\/a> (BTS).\u00a0 If you are currently using BTS, I recommend switching because 1) it&#8217;s closed sourced, and 2) owned by an American company, and thus 3) likely to implement NSA-style backdoors. This is made more likely by the fact that newer versions default to using a website to share the private key needed to set up a shared folder. Very suspicious. It makes it very easy to snoop the private key. If you must use it, use the old <a href=\"http:\/\/www.filehorse.com\/download-resilio-sync-64\/20029\/\">1.4.110<\/a> version which does not have this suspicious &#8216;feature&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>However, really, use Syncthing. It&#8217;s free unlike Dropbox etc. The trade-off is that there is no central server. You only have your own network to synchronize between. I recommend setting up a network of devices using your trustworthy friends. Simply synchronize important folders to each other and pick people who don&#8217;t snoop your data or encrypt it to be safe (they must be trustworthy, but perhaps their wife\/husband\/kids aren&#8217;t).<\/p>\n<p>I have used the software for more than a year and here are some experiences and comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Syncthing works well on mobile devices (only tested Android). I use it to automatically synchronize photos from my camera and to synchronize a subset of my elibrary to the mobile devices.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes there are version conflicts. It&#8217;s usually easy to figure out which file is newer. One can open both of them to verify the choice.<\/li>\n<li>Most of the version conflicts contain temporary files or cache files. A bit annoying having to have to keep telling it which to use.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re on Sindows, use the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/canton7\/SyncTrayzor\">SyncTrazor<\/a> GUI. It&#8217;s a small stand-alone browser that automatically runs, restarts, updates etc. Syncthing for you.<\/li>\n<li>One can use versioning for files that frequently get edited, so as to avoid data loss. There are multiple types of versioning available. It&#8217;s not as good as git, but it&#8217;s reasonable good and suitable for larger files.<\/li>\n<li>There does not seem to be any practical limitations to the size of shared folders. I have multiple with &gt;400 GBs and they run fine.<\/li>\n<li>There does not seem to be any practical limitations with the number of devices interconnected. I have clusters with 2-10 devices without any problems.<\/li>\n<li>Connections can be poor when both devices are on the same LAN. It seems mostly related to the initial ability to connect. If in a hurry, make a wifi hotspot for one device to use to get around the problem.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes files will fail to synchronize. This is almost always because of illegal names. Windows and unix (linux\/mac) have different rules for which characters that can be in names and how long names can be. So Windows devices will fail to synchronize names like &#8220;Henry Ford: My Favorite Car.pdf&#8221; because of the colon. One can click the &#8220;failed items&#8221; in the GUI to see which items are failing and get an idea about how to fix it.<\/li>\n<li>In one case have I tried the index getting corrupted. This can be deleted manually and then it rebuilds itself on the next run. It can take a while, but I had no data loss. They should add a &#8220;Rebuild index&#8221; button to the GUI.<\/li>\n<li>Syncthing does not handle very large files that are in use well. In my case I sync a virtual computer image which is a 40 GB file. If this file is open (=virtual computer running), it results in high CPU use because it keeps scanning the file while it gets changed. Note: pausing only pauses the syncing, not the indexing. One has to close it entirely. Still have not found a good solution to this problem. Can be a little alleviated by increasing the scanning intervals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Syncthing is a open source synchronization application. It&#8217;s a replacement for the closed source Bittorrent Sync (BTS).\u00a0 If you are currently using BTS, I recommend switching because 1) it&#8217;s closed sourced, and 2) owned by an American company, and thus 3) likely to implement NSA-style backdoors. This is made more likely by the fact that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2427,2426],"class_list":["post-6283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer","tag-synchronization","tag-syncthing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6283"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6285,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6283\/revisions\/6285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emilkirkegaard.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}