kinow3 days ago
Most of whayt I emailed myself were links to have a look at later.
I stopped doing that after learning about the sync feature in Firefox, and the option to send tabs across devices.
it just uses your local wifi. run it on your machines, tell them to trust each other, and you're set. and if you manage to edit the same file at once, it handles the conflict and saves both copies.
for anyone who just wants to get files from point a to b without the headache. hope it makes your life a bit less annoying.
github: https://github.com/sirbread/sink binary: https://github.com/sirbread/sink/releases/tag/v0.1
I stopped doing that after learning about the sync feature in Firefox, and the option to send tabs across devices.
For quickly sending a file, url, text or whatever between two devices, I usually use a selfhosted version of https://tnxfr.com (https://github.com/mustakimali/just-an-email). Thanks to a web interface, it works on almost every device.
It's also much more stimulating to build something than ask like a pedant "why this exists when Syncthing?", so, I guess the joke's on them.
came back curious to see if the discussion took a different direction from besides sarcasm or another 30 posts saying “why not syncthing?” - glad to see the couple to comments including OP and yours as constructive.
that being said, i’m a syncthing user, including running my own (st) discovery server on openwrt. aside from some annoyance at rather frequent conflicts and being browser based, im running it on all 5 major OSs, including ios (mobius sync) and android.
i strongly disagree that running it on a phone is a pain, and in fact, found it the most reliable and versatile sync solution for ios by far - and that includes icloud, dropbox, google drive and google photos.
the only thing that comes close is apple photos, but that’s specifically for photos. and that too, only because of the deep os integration, ie always running in the background and allowing seamless access to older photos that are not on device. even then, there’s always a mysterious slight difference in # of items reported on the mac vs the phone - “eventual consistency”, where “eventual” is t=infinity i suppose.
I am all for implementing something own when one is dissatisfied with the state of the art. But that's different than updating one's understanding what the state if the art is
This site is a democratic place; thus I am asking the flagger to tell what in his mind was the alleged reason for flagging.
(It is, of course, the famous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224)
I guess it is funny to me that SVN/CVS was there in 2007 since I think git wasn't even invented at the time but now new people won't even know what SVN/CVS are, I only got to know them because I wanted to download a specific folder of github and some stackoverflow comment mentioned svn
Wild times! (I was 10, my preferred source control system was “eh I have a backup somewhere I think”.)
I'm sure your intention was to be helpful, but this reads like a putdown, and the kind of effect that putdowns can have on newcomers, students, and so on is exactly the opposite of what we would like HN to be.
As for the Show HN rules, I've been here for so long, gues from the very beginning, that I forgot about these separate rules or missed when they were added; anyway, fair to point to them.
Keep in mind that not everyone sharing their work here is a grizzled veteran. Some are enthusiastic people learning to do something for the first time. The community here should welcome such users, not beat up on them, which is the effect that a comment like yours can all too easily have (though I'm sure this was not your intent).
We want this place to be welcoming and friendly, not brutal and mean to newcomers and students. I'm sure you don't want to be that kind of person, or having that kind of effect, in any case.
We want this place to be welcoming and friendly, not brutal and mean to newcomers and students. I'm sure you don't want to be that kind of person, or having that kind of effect, in any case.
Or shall I also put the “onesmartphone” in the cupboard?
also not sure why so many have a love affair with syncthing, id never heard of it but more diverse software in the world is a good thing imho. the more wheels reinvented the better, its fun!
More seriously, I am mostly working like this now. I've had at least some data loss or reliability from every single sync solution I've tried so am practicing avoidance where possible.
I really want something to work but I can't find anything that does and I've tried all major ecosystems and syncthing etc.
I spent a decade as a lead on an industry-leading commercial sync product. Once you start working on details, tools like this can get very time consuming.
(They're also very fun to work on.)
The devil is all the corner cases, and there are a LOT of corner cases in sync; especially if you handle renames as renames. (IE, instead of treating a rename as a delete and recreate.)
My $0.02: Decide if this is a one-off project, hobby, or something you want to turn full time. Remember that what might seem like a bug, or a weekend project, could turn into a long coding journey. It's important to understand your commitment going in, because you don't want to "bite off more than you can chew."
You can find my website in my profile (and thus email) if you want to contact me and ask anything.
rsync - I think everybody knows this
rclone - modern feature packed tool similar to rsync, but also more complex
croc - a modern cross platform file transfer utility
syncthing - sync service with web gui to keep multiple devices in sync
LocalSend - An open source GUI tool also for mobile devices
restic - a tool for encrypted backups with rolling hash deduplication
immich / ente.io - Photo backup app with frontend and backend
zfs - filesystem with send and receive
Syncthing on iOS still seems to be iffy so I'd be interested if Sink can help fill in this space eventually.
If you ever want to work on a commercial grade native sync and cloud storage platform, send me a mail.
I also recommend magic wormhole.
Guess which one got digitally defaced a couple of times each semester. Guess which ones got left alone. Genius move by the IT guy. Every time it happened he would come talk to the club members about the difference between whitehat and blackhat hacking but other than that nobody ever got in trouble.
well, aside from getting students more interested in programming, apparently.
(The team do tend to fix those accessibility problems pretty fast. But spending a couple days a month working around a tool is not my idea of fun.)
It does have `syncthing cli ...` which -I think- lets you do everything but to call it obtuse would be an understatement.
It does have GUI, which I use. I wouldn't call it pretty or polished, but it works and I understand how it works and the way it works is exactly how I think syncing should work.
I've also configured it to run a GUI diff tool diffuse to easily combine changes in case of conflicts (when a file was changed on both sides since the last sync).
I wish it was a bit more modern and re-written in a modern language, but that's secondary qualities for a program.
I personally think it’s a power user tool rather than an easy to use tool. The UI can feel intimidating but is actually pretty coherent once you understand how Syncthing works.
I would compare it with Git in terms of ergonomics : a powerful tool with its own jargon that you must understand to be able to use it.
Like git, Syncthing chose to expose its internals to the user rather than hiding it behind something magic. But like git, I don’t feel like there are unnecessary complexity. Once you understand it, it’s easy to make it work because it makes sense.
Syncthing is great, but it does include everything and the kitchen sink. That's often great, but not always.
Syncthing is great but I really wish for a syncthing-lite you could deploy and configure easily.
The version we have today is really suffering from a lot of legacy.
I remember they are working on a big v2 with a revamp of the API which is a mess but they had to give up on getting rid on that horrible XML config file because it was too much work.
Be aware they also recently silently disabled the sync of symlinks on the android build, what can cause a lot of bad surprises.
They did define some specs of their protocols [0] but i haven't seen a alternative implementation yet.
- [0] https://docs.syncthing.net/specs/index.html