Echoing other comments, my backup strategy for all our devices is: Syncthing to replicate data to my NAS, restic to generate encrypted backups, and then cron+rclone to offsite those backups to Google Drive.
I absolutely love this setup.
It works anywhere. Syncthing takes care of firewall punching and all that so whether I’m at home or on the road, I know the data is being replicated correctly.
It’s immediate. Syncthing doesn’t run on some schedule. It’s constantly replicating so I know at minimum there’s a copy of all my data if something catastrophic happens.
It’s private, encrypted, and entirely in my control.
The setup is built of composable parts that can each be understood, modified, and debugged easily.
Normally I’m a little cautious about rolling my own infrastructure for something critical like backups, but this setup is so simple and robust that I just don’t worry about it.
Other use cases I’ve come up with:
I use Paperless as a DMS. It has a watch folder for automatically ingesting documents. I set up Genius Scan + Syncthing on my phone, syncing scans to the Paperless drop folder, so I can scan from my phone and automatically upload to Paperless without any additional app. Just scan and off it goes.
For a while I was playing Subnautica on my Steam Deck and my gaming rig. Subnautica doesn’t support the Steam Cloud so I used Syncthing to replicate the save data across my gaming devices.
Not particularly weird or outlandish, but of course I also use Syncthing to replicate my keepass database across devices as well.
I also have a personal wiki of Markdown notes that I sync between my laptop and phone using Syncthing.
Oh, and I use it to replicate my Calibre library between my laptop and my calibre-web server.
Basically it’s my swiss army knife of “I have data over here, I need to get that data over there” and it’s amazing!
That’d exactly what you want! When the file initially lands in the sync folder, Syncthing sends it to paperless. Paperless ingests it, deletes it, and it disappears from my phone, now stored in paperless. Exactly what I need.
If I wanted the files to stay on the phone I’d set up the phone as Send Only and the paperless side as Recieved Only.
Oh you delete them from the phone too, ok that makes sense.
I don’t delete them from the phone (because they’re also in a different app I used since before Paperless) so that’s a bit of a dilemma. I’ll have to think about it better.
The client on the sender side (the phone) knows it sent the file. It doesn’t care if the receiver side changed or deleted it. It sent the file. Its job is done. That’s why the mode is called “Send Only”.
Meanwhile the client on the receiver side (my NAS) never pushes changes back. It only responds to received sync instructions. That why the mode is called “Receive Only”.
It’s… all pretty simple. Not sure where the confusion lies?
The phone sync client would have to remember all the files it ever sends, which could be thousands. I’ve never seen a sync client that works like that, they usually compare the files that are in the source and destination folders. If syncthing can do this that’s really interesting.
Syncthing only needs to remember the current state of the files/folders it’s syncing. Not everything it’s every sync’d.
It does that by either periodically scanning the filesystem to look for changes since it last scanned (based on the file creation and modification dates that are stored in the filesystem), or it registers with the operating system to receive events when files are created, modified, or deleted.
When Syncthing notices a create, update, or delete, it pushes those changes to the receiver and then updates it’s record of the filesystem state accordingly.
It also pushes whole files, not deltas. So it doesn’t care how the files changed, only that they did.
Even with hundreds of thousands of files to sync this is a relatively small amount of state as it’s just file paths and their create/modify dates.
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.
I have become quite invested in Logseq, noting down everything from terminal commands, to shopping lists and recipes. Syncing the .md files between my desktop, laptop phone and work pc with ST works amazing.
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.
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.
Installation on phone from F-droid (Syncthing-fork) gives a 1-way share of your Camera to backup to PC whenever you get back home. That’s my top usecase… Together with syncing KeePass database since long ago too.
I have a keepass database synced between a phone, desktop and a Raspberry Pi 1. The Pi just sits as an always-on server. I don’t edit it on my phone. Here’s my problem: when I edit something on my desktop and save it I invariably get a file conflict error and have to force the Pi to accept the new ‘conflicted’ file from my desktop. Any idea why? It’s incredibly annoying!
I think you need to set up database syncronization in keepass. I had this issue for a bit until I enabled this. Basically you set a copy that’s synced with syncthing outside of your keepass folder, then another copy that keepass edits directly. Then you can set it up so that when it saves the database in keepass it will sync the edits in the one that’s mirrored y syncthing.
Ha, i have planted a few rasoberry pi zeros running just syncthing in a few relatives’ places for that. I worry about a blackout damaging them, so i have a few. Syncthing is great, as soon as a backup is made, it whisks it off all over the place, amazing.
I've got a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero's that emulate a mass storage device (basically it acts like a USB drive) that I have connected to 3D printers and my wife's embroidery machine.
Instead of using it with a network share like in the link, I share the folder with SyncThing.
It's super convenient to not have to move a USB drive around and can just leave it connected and get the files on there seamlessly.
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