Sync Files Across All Your Devices With Syncthing

so one of the problems I've been trying to solve for a number of years now is syncing files across multiple devices and when I talk about multiple devices I'm not just talking about multiple computers I'm also talking about mobile devices as well such as my Android phone the solution I've been using here for a number of years has been just syncing everything with nexcloud so if I open up my file manager I've got this folder on my system called NC for nexcloud and this particular folder is shared across my home computer as well as this computer here at my office and of course I have the nextcloud app on my phone as well and I have my own nextcloud web server that basically works as a middleman to sync between all these devices and nexcloud is pretty easy to set up although you know for a someone who's not computer literate like you know maybe your parents or your grandparents or somebody like that you know they may not be able to spin up their own nexcloud server to be able to sync AC across all their devices so I came across this uh piece of software I've known about it for a number of years now but I've never really used it personally but everybody tells me that it's dead simple to use it's called sync thing so what I've done is I installed sync thing already on my home computer I've also installed it on my Samsung Galaxy Android phone and now I'm going to install syn thing on this computer here at my office this workstation at my office and I'm going to try to sync everything between those three devices so the first thing I want to do of course is I want to install sync thing on this computer because I haven't installed it yet so I am on Arco Linux which is a Arch Linux based distribution so I'm going to do a Pudu Pacman D capital S and sync thing give it my sudo password sync thing it's a very small download no dependency so that's a very quick installation and then if I just run sync thing right here from the terminal it's going to launch in a web browser my web browser on a different workspace so let me switch back to this workspace and you can see it opens this Local web page 127.0.0.1 that's on your Local Host right and then on Port 8384 is where sync thing will launch and the very first time this pops up it's going to ask do you want to allow Anonymous usage reporting I'm going to decline that you're also going to get a warning about setting up authentication as far as do you want to set a user and password now what this is is you saw that I was able to just open a terminal or if I had a run launcher like demon or Roi or maybe I had sync thing in a proper menu system on something like gnome or KDE if I just launch sync thing it's going to take me to this page and whatever folders are being shared across my devices anybody has access to now you may not want it to be that easy to get into so if you want to you can set up a user and password for sync things so you have to log in to get to this point and if you're sharing sensitive information you probably want to do that and you especially want to do that if your devices maybe your home computer or your laptop you didn't password protect uh being able to log in maybe you're one of those people that don't require a password to log into your computer I strongly suggest you don't do that but if you're one of those people that anybody can sit down at your computer and just start using it then you probably want a password protect sync thing uh especially again if you're storing sensitive information like I don't know tax documents and things like that so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to set up a user and pass on my computer because uh everyone has to log in to be able to get into my computer anyway and even if you had the password to my computer good luck finding the key binding to launch dmenu to then launch sync thing you'd have to figure out what sync thing even installed on my system so I'll decline it for purposes of this video but the way this works is you have a default folder that gets created if I launch my file manager again in my home directory it creates this folder here sync with a capital S this is the default shared folder that is created for me I'm not going to use that folder but it's there if I wanted to use it what I could do is I could add another folder but what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to a folder I'm already sharing with sync thing on my home computer as well as my Android phone so if I click this link here for identification if I click that we have the string of numbers here the string of letters and numbers that is the identification for this computer and then we get the QR code that I can scan especially on a mobile device I could just scan that QR code if sync thing is on this device which it is and it will sync but if you're on a device that doesn't have a camera like a mobile device you can't scan that QR code you can actually share this string of numbers you can see there's links to share by email or share by SMS so I guess you could send a text message to yourself with that string if for some reason maybe your camera is broken on your mobile device or whatever but anyway you either need the string or the QR code to sync these devices and let me show show you how this would work if I open on my mobile phone here let me go ahead and launch sync thing and on the mobile app you guys won't see it but in the top right hand corner there's a plus sign for adding devices and then all I need to do is with the camera scan this QR code and as soon as it picks up that QR code you know I am now able to share between these devices and you can see I just got a message on this computer because just scanning the QR code or having that string of letters and numbers doesn't automatically sync you to a device because for security reasons right it you need two-way authentification so I've authenticated on this machine on this mobile device and then I also need to accept adding this device the other direction as well so I'm going to add device and the device name is SM whatever so that's my uh Android phone right I I'll just use the name that it suggested there and you can see now I have Remote device listed here now if I click on that you know I could get the identification for that device as well and then all I need to do is start creating some folders that I can share between the two so I already have a folder I'm sharing between my phone and my home computer all I need to do on the mobile app is just click a slider to also share that same folder with the machine titled Arco Linux and you can see this machine here is titled Arco Linux let me turn that slider on one and now you can see I get a popup do I want to share the folder called org so that's my org documents because I'm on emac on this computer as well as my home computer and I want the same folder of org documents because that's mostly what I write things in is in org mode and I can have org mode on my phone as well there's even or related uh programs for mobile so yeah let's add that the folder is called org I've already labeled it on the other devices I'm just going to keep the folder name as or the folder path will be home slorg so let's click save there and you can see it's syncing that folder so so let me go ahead and open my File Manager again and now in my home directory I have this folder created org and there are all the org documents that are now synced from this phone to this computer to my home computer amongst the three of them how cool is that you know we didn't have to set up any kind web server right there's nothing there's nothing complicated I mean I guess it's kind of complicated because you do have to have sync thing installed on all the devices and you do have to confirm on all the devices yeah I want to share between this device and that device and between that device and that you know because you it's it's not going to automatically share from one machine to another without both people on each end of those machines clicking okay but other than that you know this is dead simple this is much more simple than setting up a nexcloud server but setting up a nexcloud web server is not hard but again a lot of people don't know anything about setting up web hosting or anything so for me you know I'm going to play with this for a while you know I I've been happy with my next Cloud Server I may keep my nextcloud server up and running but I'm going to experiment I'm some of the things I'm syncing with nexcloud I'm going to move over to Simply syncing them with sync thing for a while just to see how it Compares how stable it is do do I ever experience any headache any kind of breakage or anything so that is sync thing for those of you that uh also want to play around with syn thing there is a great Arch wiki page on sync thing one thing you want to do is you definitely want to make sure that sync thing starts on Startup so there is a system D service for sync thing if I scroll down here under this section here 2.2 Auto starting sync thing it gives you the uh systemd startup service it needs to be called sync thing at your username dos service so I haven't done this already on this computer so let's go ahead and do this so what I need to do let me clear the screen and we need to do this with Pudu privileges let's Pudo system CTL enable sync thing at DT because DT is the user here on my system D- now so go ahead and enable it and D- now go ahead and start the service if it's not already running now in my case the service is already running but now every time I start my computer right every time system D initializes sync thing will automatically run and then the sync between this computer and whatever other devices are also running sync thing should automatically happen so that is sync thing I'm very excited about this I'm kind of stoked so so I'll keep you guys informed if I run into any issues with syn thing or if I find any new and exciting things that maybe you know some interesting features that I haven't explored yet with sync thing you know we may do some future videos as well before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Matt Paul Steve West arotic Armor Dragon Commander angry dof George Lee Matthew methos Nate Aran Paul peace archor reality foress red profet Roland Soul t r tools deward t a and Willie these guys they're might has tier patrons overh patreon without these guys this quick look at syn thing would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon if you guys want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like sync thing subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 23,453

Keywords:

Id: i6LuV7Pl2YU

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024