Intro & config file location

Support
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What I’m using syncthing for: I have a goal of backing a linux PC and a Windows 7 PC to a Raspberry Pi which I want to dedicate as a backup server. (Yes, I’ve read the install docs)

A problem that I am having: I know that to let ST know where the config/database files are I need to use the “home” command line parameter, but I’m using the web interface, so how do I pass this parameter in a URL?

So, one step at a time on what I have done…

Install on the R-Pi was easy. Install on the linux PC was also easy, but I installed into /home/mark which is the directory that I want to backup. After starting to configure syncthing, I realized that this installation was “not a good thing” ™. I deleted my ST director and re-installed to /usr/local . I thought this would solve the problem. But, ot so fast, as I found out. The configuration/database files are stored in ~/.config/syncthing. I have also found out that using the “home” startup directive, I can put these files in another location.

I know that it makes good general sense to put the configuration/database files in the ~/.config directory, but IMO, it is so common to backup a home directory, that there is a good case to be made to relocate the configuration/database files to a subdirectory of syncthing like “/syncthing/.config” . What do you think? Good idea?

Thanks,

Mark

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It doesn’t matter where syncthing’s config lives. You should probably make sure it doesn’t sync it’s own directories as that will most likely blow up.

Also, Syncthing is not for backing up, as if someone deletes a file from the backup, it will be deleted everywhere.

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re: syncthing is not for backing up…

OK. I got that. Can syncthing help in this scenario? PC “A” is syncthing-ed to PC “B”. PC “A” stops working. Is there a way to get the files on PC “B” (from PC “A”)to be synced back to a new PC…call it PC “C”?

Thanks, Mark

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Yeah, you add a new PC, and that should sync it. But let’s say PC A stops working because files got removed… that would remove files on PC B putting you in an unrecoverable situation.

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Bad idea. I don’t think any *nix user would be happy if software started storing files in the root directory. It wouldn’t work 99% of the time anyway, unless you were running as root there would be no write access by default. Please don’t run as root without a good reason.

You are better of using a backup solution than synching if your goal is a backup.

If Computer A dies you would be able to remove the HDD and copy the data from that. If you can’t read the data from Computer A because the hard drive is what has failed there is a good chance you will have corrupted at least some of the data on the RPi and you will not be able to read it from there either.

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