Syncthing usage almost hitting 30k active users

Hi all,

I’m really pleased to see a good increase in Syncthing users even it has not hit the v1 milestone yet. Since past year the user base almost doubled (from 15k to 27k). I would thank all developers and users who made this happen.

It feels to me a more modern and user friendly bi-directional rsync.

For people who don’t know where the anonymous data reporting is going to: https://data.syncthing.net/

Kind regards, Jerry

5 Likes

FYI that number is much lower than the actual number of users. The Android app alone has around 30k active installs according to Google Play.

2 Likes

Yes I would also like to thank anyone who has contributed to Syncthing/ SyncTrayzor. As a Windows desktop end-user, I am starting to dislike how the big players in the industry, are pushing us towards the cloud, and collecting and using our personal data. I much prefer to sync my data onto my own hardware.

I used to like Buddy Backup and would have paid for it as a business user, but development of this was abruptly stopped without warning. I also thought the computer to computer backup provided by Crashplan, which was free of charge for home users, was excellent. Sadly, Crashplan are exiting the home user market. For me Syncthing bridges the gap between more complicated alternatives and what a typical end-user could realistically be expected to set up. I would really like to see a Receive only folder type though (yes I know, I know) :-).

2 Likes

Yes the 30k users are the only ones which report anonymous stats to data.syncthing.net. Also some people and companies are able to run their own infrastructure. So they are not counted as well.

I think there is more to it.

It is complicated to tell exactly how many users are there, because (at least I think) numbers shown at the top of https://data.syncthing.net/ are for devices, not for users although it says in description. And for syncthing to actually work as intended, you need at least 2 devices for one user (for example I use 6).

But count users based on number of devices is also non trivial task not only because “Number of Devices in Cluster” in 50% column isn’t average but median.

But we can at least try to count devices:

I think best way is to use number “Connections” from http://relays.syncthing.net/. Instead of “number of devices with reporting enabled which showed in last 24 hours” it shows “number of devices with ‘Relaying, default relays’ running right now” (As far as I know one device can be connected only to one relay at the same time.). From data usage we know that 94% of users which are reporting are using “Relaying, default relays”, for those with reporting off I expect this number to be lower. Considering only small part of those devices runs 24/7 I dare to guess there is at least 3 times more devices running regularly.

And as @jerryjacobs mentioned there is number of devices running “off the grid” with their own relays, relay pools and discovery servers. And that number is next to impossible to guess right.

But ultimately @calmh is most qualified to tell how many devices there is from main discovery servers (or at least he could be if he wanted I guess, I don’t know if discovery servers actually are collecting this info). But “off the grid” devices eludes him as well.

1 Like

Because i’m always curious where the Syncthing project is heading, I opened today the usage reports site. It looks great with the new graph of the client anonymous data! Keep it up guys.

2 Likes