Migrating to Syncthing from Nextcloud

I had been running NextCloud for years, but it didn't completely fit my use case. I wanted to use it to sync files easily between my laptop and a server, but the NextCloud client for Linux is kind of slow and clunky and the Android client on the phone appears to get into loops where it doesn't know how to deal with duplicate files.

Having looked over NextCloud and realizing I haven't actually used much of the other functionality, I decided to look into alternatives. Since my $DAYJOB involves looking after PHP web servers, I wasn't really happy at having to use PHP for NextCloud even if I was only using it as a glorified file server.

Use Case

My wife and I each have laptops, and I have a couple of servers I back up files on. We don't need anything fancy, just something that will do the job. If I stick a document up somewhere, I'd like it to be backed up onto my wife's laptop. (For example, a scanned in bill or bank statement.)

I wanted something that wouldn't need to involve constant interaction, but still move files between machines. The NextCloud client is really slow and it can bog down the PHP server running NextCloud.

Syncthing

Since I really wasn't going to use Caldav or have all my contacts and calendar on NextCloud, I remembered someone mentioned Syncthing a while back on IRC.

Syncthing, when running in the background silently syncs your files between machines and the files in specific directories that you choose.

The Web UI it has takes some getting used to, but basically you just need to configure it so that the files in a certain directory get shared with other clients.

There's a great Getting Started Guide on their website.

Happy Syncing!

Now I can copy files to directories and I know my wife's laptop will pick them up and also some files will be stored on my cloud server which also gets backed up. The more places you have files saved, the better your backups will be.

I run this in my .xinitrc:

syncthing serve --no-browser --no-restart --logfile=default --logflags=0 &

Logs are saved in $HOME/.local/share/syncthing/syncthing.log so I can look there if there are any issues.

I highly recommend looking into Syncthing if you need a nice way to sync files between machines.