Help me understand best way to sync phone?

Support
1

Hi all,

I love Syncthing, but I’m a pretty basic user and I’m hoping you can help me understand a relatively simple setup.

Use case:

  • I have loads of photos and videos on my phone (like most people), periodically it gets too full and I need to empty it.
  • Emptying it on the mobile is a faff due to slow wifi speeds, sorting on the phone is fiddly and Google are constantly trying to push you to their cloud services, so they make it deliberately hard.

Vision

  • Ideally I’d create a ‘synced’ folder on my NAS, that basically just shows a perfect copy of what’s on my phone.
  • Then, if I delete or move a photo/video out of this NAS folder, syncthing would spot and remove it from my phone also at the next sync.
  • This would mean I could rapidly sort through photos with all the benefits/speed of big screen, multi monitors, mouse etc!

Sorry if this is a stupidly obviously question and syncthing might do this by default, I just can’t get my head around how it knows ‘which way’ to sync - ie if I delete a file on my NAS, how does it know whether to copy a new version from my phone to restore it or to delete off my phone!?

2

I would even say that it is the most common case for the average user. It takes some time to understand the basics and to set up the right configuration, but it’s worth it!

Tracking the changes on both sides allows you to know that a file is not new on the phone but was also there on the NAS and was deleted.

3

Ah, that makes sense - super, ok will give it a stab, but sounds like this neat software will be perfect!

4

It is also advisable to use file versioning on both sides to avoid data loss: only a few days on the phone and a few weeks on the other side.

5

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