What are you non-obvious, maybe strange usecases of Syncthing?

For example syncing the media library with your friend or maybe your entire /home/user folder between your PC and laptop?

I’d love to hear your ideas!

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I mean, how does Syncthing know not to copy a file again if it copied it once and paperless deleted it?

    • zaphod@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      The client on the sender side (the phone) knows it sent the file. It doesn’t care if the receiver side changed or deleted it. It sent the file. Its job is done. That’s why the mode is called “Send Only”.

      Meanwhile the client on the receiver side (my NAS) never pushes changes back. It only responds to received sync instructions. That why the mode is called “Receive Only”.

      It’s… all pretty simple. Not sure where the confusion lies?

      • lemmyvoreEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        The phone sync client would have to remember all the files it ever sends, which could be thousands. I’ve never seen a sync client that works like that, they usually compare the files that are in the source and destination folders. If syncthing can do this that’s really interesting.

        • zaphod@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          No it doesn’t.

          Syncthing only needs to remember the current state of the files/folders it’s syncing. Not everything it’s every sync’d.

          It does that by either periodically scanning the filesystem to look for changes since it last scanned (based on the file creation and modification dates that are stored in the filesystem), or it registers with the operating system to receive events when files are created, modified, or deleted.

          When Syncthing notices a create, update, or delete, it pushes those changes to the receiver and then updates it’s record of the filesystem state accordingly.

          It also pushes whole files, not deltas. So it doesn’t care how the files changed, only that they did.

          Even with hundreds of thousands of files to sync this is a relatively small amount of state as it’s just file paths and their create/modify dates.