slightly #offtopic , but this topic is relevant to most threads. If this thread is to be deleted, then please for the love of god please create a sticky to discuss drawing the line between file organisation and deployment of syncthing. Or some links to threads on how to design a home network that links to a work network and mobile devices.
Getting away from syncthing has been the best decision I ever made. That’s because while syncthing is fantastic, it’s still sync and sync is difficult.
The problem flexibility and variation in people’s personal lives. This forum isn’t about that, but it’s core to everything. It’s very easy to make a mess. People have a lot of portable devices, not so many static devices these days, and they’re moving across many different networks. That is very difficult to organise around.
What many people do is to have a single centralised server, possibly at home, and then use that a base point from which to base everything around. This works for some people. It didn’t work for me.
I found that in the field, this just doesn’t really work 100% reliably enough. All it takes is one failed sync to ruin your day. There is no 100% proof sync logic, and it gets worse the more mobile devices you have. Maybe your phone is up to date, but somehow the tablet failed. Then you’ve got duplicates to diagnose. You then have to manually compare the files, try to assess potential damage and then try to diagnose why the sync went wrong.
Usually I found that there wasn’t any lost data, but very rarely did I find out why the sync failed to learn how to prevent it. Perhaps it failed because I lost connectivity, but I wouldn’t know where I was or how to prevent that happening again.
What I did in the end was to make a laptop wit htons of storage as the central point for everything rather than the server. I then started using the laptop more. Sometimes I’d use my phone, but for this I’d use sync services that are built into the apps themselves; Obsidian sync rather than syncthing. No more problems.
Because syncthing is not a backup solution, I even dropped the home server and freed up that space at home.
As an aside, I actually went to Apple for this laptop strategy, upgrading the SSD cheaply. But now they’re price gouging on storage heavily, so this strategy doesn’t work and I’m debating using remote access to a home server instead. Lesson learned: stay away from Apple; I was very careful, and they still sucked me in.
.