My FreeBSD user expereince

User Stories
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Well, I did it. I removed Resilio from all my machines, with just one remaining to go. I noticed the newer version(s) dropped reporting cpu and memory usage, which disappointed me a tiny bit, but *nix OSs already have great reporting tools so no loss really.

All seems flawless, I used the FreeBSD ports/package ‘tree’ along with Synth (a FreeBSD program package tool) to install Syncthing, added the /etc/rc.conf entry so that it starts automatically, which is slick since my machines are headless. In case anyone is curious my design/topology is this:

  • Three main ‘servers’ syncing a bunch of ‘parent’ folders, each containing specific content inside multiple sub-folders.

  • One parent folder, that has a small number of ‘churn’ files is set to rescan every minute. By ‘churn’ I mean a few dozen files less than 200KB will suddenly appear and an hour or so later be deleted by a cron job. Other parent folders have hundreds of GB of data, files seldom change, and I set the rescan interval to 6 hours.

  • A few Android devices syncing to one or two of those parent folders, and too all of the three server nodes.

  • Eventually others devices might be syncing, but may not be syncing to all server nodes, but only one or two of them.

  • Files can be added, modified or deleted on any node, but in my use-case there is no possibility of the same file being whacked and smacked the same time on two or more machines.

I am really really pleased with Syncthing so far; really hoping to have a long happy marriage with only a few ‘cosmetic’ bugs along the way.

TOP output if anyone is curious:

last pid: 13773;  load averages:  1.77,  1.21,  1.18 up 1+06:02:55  17:43:58
27 processes:  1 running, 26 sleeping
CPU:  3.1% user,  0.0% nice,  4.7% system,  0.1% interrupt, 92.1% idle
Mem: 484M Active, 11G Inact, 1253M Laundry, 2351M Wired, 1557M Buf, 195M Free
Swap: 3598M Total, 410M Used, 3187M Free, 11% Inuse

  PID USERNAME   THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME     CPU COMMAND
553 syncthing  165  29    9  1380M   557M uwait   1  28:51   0.18% syncthing
506 syncthing   15  38    0   710M  8096K uwait   3   0:01   0.00% syncthing
505 syncthing    1  20    0  6376K   756K piperd  9   0:00   0.00% daemon
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FWIW (and I’m sure this has been mentioned elsewhere too) I was also disappointed to see the CPU and Memory usage removed. Glad you got up and running on your BSD. :slight_smile:

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Same! I have removed rslsync from all of my devices, and am now using Syncthing successfully on my FreeBSD server and Android devices. Working flawless and much happier.

I’m mainly using it to backup photos & videos from the phones, and Signal backups, and occasionally sync a movie to the phone for watching locally.

I do miss Selective Sync, but I work around that by simply hardlinking an object of interest on my server into a “shuffle” share I have created. And then just remove the hardlink when I’m done with it.

The only thing I have yet to setup that I had with rslsync is the RetroPie metadata backups from the Raspberry Pis. I’ll get around to it someday; haven’t been playing that much since Stadia came out.

I am glad Syncthing supports FreeBSD even though its total number of installs are quite small. Thank you, devs!!

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Yes indeed, a big thank you to the Devs.

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