I love Syncthing. It has solved a very important problem for me and keeps me in control of my data instead of some third party that I can’t know isn’t snooping on my files. I even stood up a relay server to chew up the rest of my server’s monthly bandwidth allocation.
I’ll plug EteSync. No affiliation, but they do E2EE contact/calendar sync too and it works well. It’s also open source/self hostable, but it’s also only $2/month to use the hosted version.
I use SyncThing for file syncing and it works splendidly, so I’ll have to try this out and see how it compares to EteSync. At first glance, EteSync is simpler
I didn’t remember the differences with DAVx⁵ and decSync (that I’m using with syncthing), they’re very similar I guess the main difference is what they sync to: webDAV, local, EteSync server?
The only weird step for me is when I restore the LineageOS seedvault backup that already carries the contacts.
I use DAVx⁵ too. It’s good for stuff like syncing with Google calendar on a degoogled phone, like if you work at a place that uses gcal. Very different than decsync/EteSync from what I understand.
Regrettably, I think Syncthing is a cool concept, but in practice it’s just really battery heavy and difficult to configure. In theory, I could synchronize my passwords and contacts and gallery with it, but in practice…
- Things you want to uploaded in one direction, such as photos you want to delete upon synchronization, basically cannot be uploaded that way
- Constantly updated things like a password file or a contact list, must have the app running across multiple devices in order to correctly synchronize - and Syncthing chews through battery
- You don’t have the option to make anything “cloud only” with Syncthing either
Basically: if you want resilient bi-directional synchronization, Syncthing is great. But for everything else, I’ve had to assemble a patchwork of options (Ente, Bitwarden, Filen being my go-tos).
What issues did you have with one-way photo syncing? I actually do that right now and it works just fine. I set it to send-only from my phone, and after I ingest them into my Immich server, I delete them on my phone and the synced copy gets removed from the server, leaving only the ones ingested into Immich.
It probably helps you’re using Immich! But I would even be nervous with that configuration, because I wouldn’t necessarily be sure whether something had successfully uploaded because there’s no interface to really tell me so. Syncthing discourages using it for backup aka unidirectional synchronization, so your configuration isn’t exactly conventional…
If I did get into advanced server management, I would probably stick to Ente, but presently they already have my money and I’ve found a reasonable way to back up photos not just from my device to a cloud, but from their cloud to a desktop computer - which sounds like it would result in, basically, what you have already, minus the stress of managing a second sync device, and possibly with far less battery drain
It probably helps that it’s a manual process. When I ingest stuff into Immich, I make sure that everything is synced properly first. I don’t have anything fancy with like ingesting and then deleting photos automatically, I definitely wouldn’t trust that. Hopefully Immich declares their photo syncing stable soon and I can switch to that.
