Hello, we are in the process of setting up Syncthing for the first time and we have some questions about how to start/best practices.
There is a group of users, most of them running Windows clients, and one Ubuntu server which is supposed to host an always-on instance for each user. Our current setup uses multiple Resilio Sync instances, most users have “Read-Only” folders on the server (because no changes should originate on the server) and “Read-Write” folders on all of their other computers (laptops, desktops, …). Some users also use restic to pull backups from some of the synced “Read-Only” folders regularly. We would ideally like to replicate this setup with Syncthing.
Right now it looks to us like the best solution are multiple systemd services of syncthing@username.service running in parallel and independently. That way all of the users get their own instance, folders etc. We have a few points we are not clear on, so here they go:
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We have read that a read only folder was in the making (A proposal for a receive-only folder type), but is not there yet. This would have been nice, because for a lot of things the server should only read (“being always on”) the changes and distribute them, but should NOT be allowed to make changes if the user on the server changes something by accident. However, the user should be able to have as many additional read&write machines as they want. (In short: Multiple read/write masters, one read/distribute slave.) Can this be done right now? If so, how? What is the closest alternative if not?
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If a user has say three locations (server, laptop, desktop) where they have folders in sync from previous software (Resilio in this case) what would be the better way to start syncing with syncthing: a) Add all folders on all the nodes “at the same time”, Syncthing recognizes that it does not need to sync anything, just index and its fine. b) Or delete the old syncs and use e.q. the laptop as a seed to get everything in sync (maybe go somewhere with a nice upload). c) Any other option?
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If we will run multiple instances (5+), do we have to take care and change some of the ports because of multiple user instances of syncthing? Obviously each WEB UI will be running on a different port, but should we set the TCP ports to different values as well? Or does Syncthing automatically take care of this?
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If there are 5+ people syncing 5 folders each with tens of gigabytes, so potentially say 25 folders, 20 GB each, what are some reasonable parameters for scanning intervals? We ran into issues with Resilio before that on each user, by the time the rescan of each folder finished, it was already past due to scan for changes again and this generated more than 25 processes permanently scanning the drive in parallel, which is not optimal for RAID operations. Is there a way around this? How should we handle this?
Thank you for all advice and tips, we appreciate your help.