Starting Syncthing

Hello all, Merry Christmas, I hope everyone had a good one!

I’m after a bit of assitence if someome could please help. I am very new to Linux and sshing etc… so please go easy one me, first off a little back story.

As you will all know Google are stopping thier unlimited photo uploads in June, which means I needed a solution to backup mine and the wife’s photos. I wasn’t too concerned at first but we have both just updated our phone to a Mi 10 and a S20 Ultra, both featured a 108mp camera meaning 99% of our photos are now stupidly large in file size, which of course means our free 15gb would soon be eaten up!

So I needed a solution;

  1. Degoo - I’ve heard horror stories about people having there account wiped for ‘no’ reason, so not entirely sure I want to trust it
  2. Synology NAS - I have a 1815+ with 32TB with ‘Moments’ installed, I’m happy using this but Moments seems to downgrade the quality of my photos and it’s not the best at automatically syncing and seems to use a lot of system processing to upload the images (I use the NAS for streaming media)
  3. Open Media Vault - using Syncthing to back up from our Android phones

This was my original intention, to use OMV with Syncthing, but I am using a Lagacy Raspberry Pi Model B and OMV didn’t want to run, which after I thought a bout it I didn’t need OMV and just Syncthing. Why am I using a very old peice of hardware? Simple I’ve had it in a draw for years and not used it so want to put it to use for something good.

After much tinkering today I have finally got Syncthing working, albeit on a test/temp basis until I get a couple of new WD Red hard drives and some cables.

Now for my question, I have installed Raspian Lite on a 2GB microsd card (why a 2gb card? Because who can use them for anything else?!) Which has made the job harder as when I try to transfer my photos (currently sat at circa 40gb) the database file got too big on my microsd card and caused it to stop syncing, so I needed to change the location of the .config folder onto the USB thumb drive, which I have now figured out when I installed Syncthing. I now want Syncthing to run as service on startup, I am wondering how I do this?

I started Syncthing by; syncthing -home=/disk1/config

But all the code I have seen in guides doesn’t show a -home argument example; sudo systemctl enable syncthing@USER.service

Can I just change it to read; sudo systemctl enable syncthing -home=/disk1/config@USER.service

Sorry if this sounds like a silly questions but I am still learning and trying to figure it all out.

TIA.

Just a quick one to add I realised I could just add syncthing -home=/disk1/config to crontab and it starts on boot.

I am sure there is a more elegant way of doing this. If there is please let me know.

That’ll work, or you can edit the systemd unit file to add the arguments you want. How to do that is more systemd than I have the stomach for right now, but systemd edit seems to be one way, along with just editing the file on disk. Some other openmediavault users seem to be running Syncthing from Docker, which there may be some built in GUI for or Docker can manage it with --restart=always.

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