For over a year I have been using synchthing syncing a few folders between my ubuntu and android.
Now I would like to sync most of my ubuntu home folders in a cloud syncthing instance like untrusted device. So in case of crash my laptop hard-disk or my laptop is stolen I have access to an updated backup.
I could use oracle cloud compute instance, or aws ec2, or digital ocean, with sth like wasabi or backblaze b2… or maybe even running locally a docker container with syncthing with a wasabi mounted…
Has someone already set up something similar? how did you set up?
I went the VPS route because it was more network and system resource efficient compared to syncing to a local mount point.
However, for backups, I’m using a separate dedicated tool that supports S3-compatible and other cloud storage services. Although it meant managing two different tools, it’s still less complicated than molding Syncthing’s untrusted folder and versioning features into what a purpose-built backup tool already does better out of the box.
As an update: I followed your recommendation I am using now a dedicated tool for backups. I chose vorta+borgbase. It wraps borg and the borgbase cloud service is quite inexpensive.
Still I would like to have a untrusted device to be synced? Currently I have my laptop and phone syncing music, photos, docs… and I would like to have a 3rd device that is always on. Now very often it happens that my phone is on but my laptop is off, so in case of my phone crash or get lost I would be lost the data from the last sync.
Does anyone recommend a cheap VPS with around 100gb of space?
In terms of privacy and security I does not have to care too much as I gonna set up the vps as untrusted syncthing device, right?
I’m sorry, I accidentally deleted my previous reply…
Your encrypted data should be safe but everything else not so much. I wouldn’t want to try it if there are simple ways to significantly minimize the risk.
In this case that I am describing you can synchronize to a cloud drive without it being an untrusted device. It will simply be a local folder that you synchronize files to.
There is a nice utility program that I use to synchronize with a Cloud Drive. It is called Rclone.
I use Google Drive as it is $1.67 per month us for 100 gb.
It supports many Cloud providers including backBlaze and S3 and Google and many others.
While rclone can be used to sync data, I use it to simply mount Cloud drives in the Linux file system.
The command:
rclone mount google:/syncthing ~/google
Create the remote profile by typing:
rclone config
/home/Google can be your cloud drive for example. Then you tell syncthing to use that folder to synchronize files.
Hi Wank, thanks for sharing.
I am not sure if I fully understand what you meant, but I believe you are uploading your data to cloud (google drive, backblaze…) unencrypted. This is something I want to avoid.
the default configuration that I mentioned transfers the files to the server using in my case Google Drive authentication credentials with the password so the data is not traveling over the internet unencrypted.
If you would like to store the files on the cloud server in an encrypted state you can do that too.
First, you would create the Google remote.
Then, there is an option to create an encrypted version of that remote using the “crypt” option.
In this particular case, the files on the server would themselves be in an encrypted state and the cloud provider whoever it is would have no access to the files. Each file gets individually encrypted.
Locally, on your computer, the files would be in an unencrypted state.
sounds interesting rsync with crypt option, but not sure if it is what I need. I want to have a couple of folders synced between my laptop and phone, even when one of them are off. For that I needed a 3rd device. As I don’t trust a computer is not only managed by myself (potentially a google or any VTS provider admin could have access to my cloud space), so it has to be an untrusted device with encrypted data, also at rest.
With your google-rsync approach I would need to mount this google cloud in my phone. Can we mount google cloud with rsync in an encrypted way in android too?
Also I had degoogled my phone time ago, using rsync with google even with crypt option seems to me a bit like a backward step.
it seems they only offer the public static ip for more expensive VPS, but not for the cheapest ones. Anyway for syncthing we don’t need public static ip.
I try to navigate from netcup.eu homepage to mikro and piko VTS, but I can’t. I have to search them in google. What category these VTS are in?
Well, I think I will use Piko VTS too, much cheaper, I would just need to add addition Local Block Storage, but still much cheaper than Mikro. I guess 1 gb RAM is quite enough for personal usage syncthing.
Piko VTS comes with 30gb if I add 50gb local-block-storage, I will have a /home of 80gb? or I will have 30gb /home + /media volume of 50gb?
Can VPS G10s and G11s also be expanded with storage space?
No, unfortunately this is not possible.
Local Block Storage is available for our Root-Servers starting from G9, VPS x86 G10 (up to a maximum of 8 TB), and VPS ARM64 G11 (up to a maximum of 4 TB).
Nah, they required that to me by email even before asking for payment method. What seems to me quite intrusive. Who asks for a personal photo holding your personal ID? just finance institutions.
Does anyone know any other alternative for a cheap VPS (100gb storage) for syncthing?
