First 90 days with Syncthing

[xHN35RQ]

Thanks for sharing your story, I enjoyed reading it.

@dswd

Installing syncthing was easy thanks to the Ubuntu PPA. However I felt a little uneasy installing software from an unknown location that is not even endorsed by the software developers. But installing software outside of my packet management so that I have to care about updates myself seemed even worse.

Syncthing can now auto-update itself. You can download the Syncthing binary directly from the releases page, and drop into ~/bin Right-click it and allow to be executable, then launch it and voila! It will open by default in your web browser, and from there you can set it to auto-update.

@dswd

I think the idea of accepting devices is interesting but it needs to be simplified. When I add/accept a device, I should be asked if I want to accept (transitively) all devices that this device accepts (which should be the default)

You can set a device to be an Introducer. You have to do this on every device connected to this main device. Once set as an Introducer, any new devices configured on the Introducer will be auto-configured on all the other devices.

Syncthing doesn’t currently support auto-accepting of shared folders.

@dswd

When synchronizing folders, instead of entering a unique name (where a single typo will make a separate folder instead of a synchronized one), all folders that are shared by other devices should be displayed so the user can select from them.

When you setup an Introducer, first add all the folders… fully setup the Introducer. Then add devices to the Introducer, and when adding a new device, select which folders you want to share with that device. So it’s sort of what you want, but in reverse.

@dswd

It should also be possible to request a directory tree of the shared folders and select a subfolder/file for synchronization. I ran into this issue when I tried to keep only the project I was currently working on on my laptop but not all the others.

On your laptop, you can selectively sync a single sub-folder of a shared folder in Edit > Ignore Patterns (example from this post)

// Don't ignore the following dirs (i.e. DO sync them):
!/DCIM
!/TitaniumBackup

// Ignore all the rest
*

@dswd

Also I think Syncthing is missing a taskbar icon that shows me the information I want: Is Syncthing still alive? Is everything synced? Is there a problem? I don’t want to periodically check the web-ui to get this information.

Take a look at SyncTrayzor for Windows, and Syncthing-GTK for Window and Linux. These apps can also download Syncthing to keep it updated for you. Also, they have notifications if you want them.