Syncthing helps prevent against theft and disaster. Syncthing with an offline backup policy helps mitigate against ransomware, but unfortunately any policy that moves bits from one place to another allows an attack vector for malicious bits to infect the target device to which bits are being transferred.
I personally found Syncthing too complex, unpolished and confusing to be worth it, and I am an experienced software engineer in my 30s. And you’re recommending it for people who are “cognitively impaired, less able” etc? Absolutely silly.
Are you serious? Syncthing's setup comprises of quite literally two steps:
- getting both devices on the same network
- scan the QR code on one device with another
After that, I've also found that it "just works" on the level of Dropbox or Google Drive. Honestly, I've had more problems trying to get iCloud or OneDrive to work as WebDAV.
Absolutely serious. I’m puzzled by your assertion that it’s easy. I guess you were lucky and it just worked. It didn’t for me - files started getting duplicated and corrupted in weird ways. The completely awful UI made it really confusing trying to figure out what was going on, and there was no support. It’s clearly a tool for power users and enthusiasts. I went back to Dropbox because I wanted something that just works.
> The .stignore file itself will never be synced to other devices, although it can #include files that are synchronized between devices.
So you might have a synced work folder, where some large but unimportant throwaway files will be created on Host A, you exclude them to avoid having them replicated when syncing to your Host B (and C, D, E, ...). But then, ignore rules don't sync so... surprise! those throwaway files when generated in the other Hosts will show up in A and everywhere else.
Am I being too unreasonable here? Yes, you can sync a common ignore file and #include that everywhere. But the idealistic way I see computing, that's a totally superfluous step that users should not even have to worry about doing. The kind of subtle technical detail that makes me agree with the phrase "too complex, unpolished and confusing".
Still, I use Syncthing every day. I think it's great. But I'm a developer and Git taught me ways about the logic and behavior of writing ignore files; it's not an apt solution for "less able, cognitively impaired, or perhaps very young" people.
The issue seems to be recognized [1]. But what can I say? the improvement proposal was outlined in 2015 and it's still unresolved 6 years later [2]. I wouldn't hope that it will get much more approachable for less technical people anytime soon.
I actually didn't know about this, nor largely about ignore functionality. Thank you for the write-up, it definitely gives me more appreciation for what the previous contributor meant.
I'm not sure what your experience was or how long ago, but syncthing is one of very few programs I've ever had 'just work,' like absolute magic. sudo pacman -S syncthing, syncthing was all it took to stand it up, followed by extremely minimal in-app setup that was no more complex than working a modern music player. It keeps everything synced across my PCs and my mobile without any intervention on my part.
