So I am just trying SyncThing with my phone and a home server and I wonder if I could mimic Google Photos functionality with this. Right now the problem I see is that when I delete photo/video on my phone it gets deleted on the other device (server) as well, but that’s not what I want from obvious reasons - phone’s memory is not big enough to contain all my media and that is why I can delete items from gallery, but they stay in Google Photos with some of them being just online in the cloud. How can I do this with Syncthing?
The clean solution is to either move the files to another folder on the server, or use file versioning, also on the server, to keep the deleted files.
There are other methods to achieve this too, but they’re usually not recommended. This is a common request, so you can find various alternative/hacky solutions if you search the forum for “one way sync”.
Personally, I’d simply set up a script to automatically move the files to another folder on the server side. You can combine this with versioning, or even set the script as an external versioning command to do everything in a single step.
move the files to another folder - If I move them wouldn’t they immediately sync again from the phone to this folder? If this is a common request and people try to invent hacky solutions, wouldn’t it be useful to just add more options to folder types to make it more powerful? Like robocopy or other file sync utils have. I wonder why are the folder types so limited. There could be simple checkbox like “upload but don’t delete”. Wasn’t this considered by devs?
EDIT: from the search results I see this kind of functionality was requested many times since 2016 or so…
No, this would result in deleting them on the phone. That’s why the best/safest route could be to utilise file versioning for this, which would only trigger once you’ve deleted the files on the phone first.
The main reason is that “Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program” (from https://syncthing.net). The folder type options are already quite extensive. Other file synchronisation solutions, e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. offer only one folder type, which is two-way synchronisation, and that’s it.
If the folder on the phone is set as send only (which is default for DCIM folder when you install Syncthing) then files deleted from the other device cannot be deleted from the phone. Not sure if you got me - you have suggested me that it would be a clean solution to move files on the server, so that’s why I asked 
Anyway seems like it’s true - if I move files on the servers side somewhere else, they don’t get synced from the phone again, while other new files do. unless I tap “force changes” - then files missing on the server get copied from the phone again. But why the folder on my phone says “unsynced” in Syncthing GUI?
Yeah, so in this scenario, there’s no real need for setting the folder on the phone to Send Only. Otherwise, it’ll always consider remote changes/deletions as “out of sync” and present a button to override them.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.