removable usb drive

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1

How do you add an USB removable drive device to sync with your local computer? I am not looking to synchronize between the 2 computers. Thanks in advance

2

Syncthing doesn’t sync between destinations on the same computer.

3

If you still want to do it, you need to run a separate instance of Syncthing specifically for that purpose. You can even run it from the USB device itself.

4

I’m just a casual computer user. Could you please give me specific instructions on how to set it up? Thank you.

5

You can just run the binary from the USB device itself and use relative paths both for the config and the folders. However, assuming by “a casual computer user” that you do not want to deal with all this, and also that you are using Windows, then I would simply suggest trying out the portable version of SyncTrayzor from https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor/releases.

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6

I use OSX. I don’t mind fiddling with configurations, as long as I have very clear instructions to follow. Thank you so much.

7

I have no experience with Macs, so I cannot provide specific instructions for the OS, but what you need is just a folder with the Syncthing binary in it, and then some kind of a shell script to run it pointing at a config folder inside the folder.

For example,

syncthing -home=syncthing

Running the script from inside the folder will start an independent instance of Syncthing, which you can then connect to your main one, and share the folder in question between the two.

This is what I would do exactly if this was Windows. Maybe you can translate it into Mac.

  1. Connect a USB device as drive D:.
  2. Create a new folder D:\syncthing.
  3. Put syncthing.exe in D:\syncthing.
  4. Create a batch script syncthing.cmd inside D:\syncthing.
  5. In the batch script put
    syncthing.exe -home=syncthing
  6. Run syncthing.cmd.
8

Thank you for the instructions. Now I need to figure out how to implement this into osx. :slight_smile:

9

Are you sure you’re not really looking for something like Carbon Copy Cloner or maybe rsync? There are things like Mac GUIs for rsync too. Syncthing seems like a painful way to accomplish your goal as I understand it.

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10

If you have to contend with bidirectional sync, rsync has … subtleties. Personally, I found Syncthing when I was looking for something to make those go away. As it happened, live sync was a better match for me than the batch solution I’d been looking for, but that’s obviously not always going to be the case.

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11

I shall look into some of the apps you suggested… thanks.

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12

Honestly Syncthing seems nice, and I wish I could use it to simply backup my stuff to an external drive (in my case on Android).

13

This seems the perfect use case for Unison: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ That, according to its website, works on Mac too.

14

Another program that I personally like for those jobs is FreeFileSync. It gives you a nice overview about what differences there are and what it is about to do before you hit that button.

15

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