Syncthing How To - A Free Dropbox Alternative !

hey everybody it's lon seiben and i was a dropbox freeloader for many many years not only was i using a free account i was also getting about 15 gigabytes of free storage from the company because i took advantage of their referral program for the better part of a decade every time i referred a friend over i got another 250 megabytes of storage and it really added up over time dropbox was a significant part of my workflow because all of the active projects that i was working on i would save in a dropbox synced folder those files that i was working on would get synced up with all of my other computers automatically but also go off site to the dropbox cloud so i was getting an offsite backup file versioning all sorts of great stuff and i wasn't paying for it how good is that but dropbox caught up with us freeloaders and said hey if you don't pay the subscription fee we're going to limit your connected devices from unlimited amounts to only three and of course that became a real problem for me and i'm just sick of adding subscriptions to my budget every month here i've got too many things already and i wanted to find some free alternatives now many of you know i'm running with synology network attached storage devices here in the house they have their own free utility as part of that hardware device that works a lot like dropbox does but i have to open up some ports on my router or use their relay or just connect up my vpn every time i was off site to get files to sync up and it just wasn't as seamless or as secure as my dropbox connection was and i wanted something that would kind of be another seamless alternative that didn't require me to open up a whole bunch of stuff on my router to the outside world so i looked and looked and looked and i found something here called sync thing that i think is a really good alternative this is an open source project it's got a lot of support it appears out in the world and it works on everything that i was using dropbox on and it works pretty much the same way if i sync up a folder and i save a file on one computer all of the other computers get that file it works on my synology nas so i have it running on that as well that acts kind of like the server but this is a completely peer-to-peer uh file sharing and syncing service so every time one computer updates something everything else connected on the chain gets it almost immediately and the best part is it works off-site and you don't have to open up any holes in your router if you have upnp disabled on your router like i do it will work through relay servers and it encrypts all of the data prior to sending it so even if somebody is sniffing the network either locally or remotely everything is encrypted before it is transmitted and it would take a lot of resources i think to decrypt this traffic and see what kind of files you're transferring back and forth and again it's open source totally free so you don't have to worry about adding another thing to your monthly budget now we're going to look at setting this up today but if you want to get more specifics on the mechanics and the security model check out security now episode 734 where steve gibson kind of dives into how all of this works and why he thinks it is a good solution to file syncing especially if you want to get rid of a cloud service that you're paying for there's some great show notes here that you can use for additional information and this is something that steve gibson apparently is using himself to sync files up in between devices so let's get into this now we're going to set this up both here at my studio location but we're also going to connect up to my shadow server in a cloud data center far away so we can look at how we can do some of this off-site syncing as well so let's get the software installed and then we'll go ahead and start syncing up some files now if you're running on the mac or pc there are installable packages available in the downloads section of syncthing.net the windows version is called sync traceor this will run in the system tray of your windows computer and then the mac version here runs in the menu bar here at the top and i'll show you both of those versions as we work our way through the video here there are also though versions for other platforms including android there is not an ios version at the time i'm recording this video so that's one limitation but there are versions for most flavors of linux now if you have a network attached storage device head over to the community contributions page here and i've got that linked in the video description and you can find all these different versions depending on what you're running the base configurations here are command line only so if you wanted a more graphical approach you can find those packages here in the community section they have a docker container available as well and then on synology i followed the instructions here to get it installed on my synology nas it was pretty easy to do a few extra steps to get going with it but by and large it's a pretty easy installation so let's go over to the mac now and get things configured so that we can begin sharing files between this mac here on my desk and a windows cloud server located a few hundred miles away so we're going to begin here on the mac we're going to click on sync thing mac os and that's going to bring us to this page we're going to download this dmg file this will save itself into our downloads folder but i'm on chrome here so i can just click on this down in the lower section of the browser and now you'll see here we've got the sync thing dmg mounted we're going to just drag sync thing into our applications folder and once that's done you'll see it here in your applications folder you could of course move it down to your dock if you want i'm just going to double click on this to open it up we'll have that warning appear for the first time that we run it and you'll see nothing popped up here but it did actually show up here at the top and this will take a second to get going but to configure things there's a few things you'll want to do if you want this to boot up automatically every time you boot up your mac which might be the best way to go you can click on start at login here and that way it'll always load up if the sync thing software is not running your files will not sync so i think you'll probably want to leave that on especially for a computer that you're using only occasionally once that software loads up it'll start syncing and get all your files up to date now what i'm going to do here is click on the icon here at the top and go over to open because we have to start setting everything up the first thing is going to ask us is is if we want to send anonymous usage reporting back to the developers that's your choice i'm just going to select no for now it's also going to ask me about a username and password for the graphical user interface and it's going to ask us to consider setting that up now the reason why it's asking for a password is because there's a little mini web server that runs on your computer to configure and make things work on this device now by default the sync thing graphical user interface through the web browser is only available on the computer in which the software is running but you can configure it to allow remote administration and if you do that you definitely want to enable a password but for now we're going to just keep going now you'll notice here that it already set up a default sync folder for us which it put in my home directory with a sync folder there but i'm going to set one up from scratch here just so you can see how all of this works so right now we're in the documents folder in my mac os 11 install we're going to click on new folder and we're going to call this sync me and we'll drop that right in there and what i'm going to do now in the sync thing interface is click on add folder and you can see here we can give it a label so we'll just i'm just going to call this master sync for the heck of it and then we need to set a folder path now it will default to your home directory as you can see here and then i'm going to go into my documents and it will kind of prompt you as you're working your way through and you can see that it's it's found the syncme folder which is what we're going to point it at so we're going to click on that and that will direct our share to that folder again you can call it whatever you want every folder will be assigned a unique identifier and this will be the same across all the devices that you set up in your sync chain there if we click on sharing here right now we don't have any devices to share it with but we'll have more soon you can also enable file versioning i'm just going to enable simple file versioning at the moment but i will step through some of the file versioning options that you have as we work our way through all of this we're also going to set up ignore patterns in a little bit as well but we're going to leave it blank for now just because i want to get this up and running quickly and then we'll look at the advanced options here you definitely want to make sure watch for changes is enabled because that is really important for making sure things get synced up properly and i'm going to click save here and now you can see that we've got a master sync folder now it says unshared because we haven't yet connected any other devices so let's go and hit up the windows machine in the cloud and install sync thing there and connect it to our computer located here okay so now we're running windows on our remote cloud computer and we're going to go to the sync traceor utility and then we'll scroll down here you've got some options for what to install now if you are on a relatively recent computer you'll probably want the 64-bit version of the traceor app and they have a portable version which you can install on a thumb drive or you can just install it directly on the computer which is the option i'm going to choose here so i'm going to click on sync traceor setup x64exe here and we'll go ahead and save that to our downloads folder it's a pretty quick download so it's probably already here so i'll go into my downloads here and i will find that sync tracer setup and we'll execute that you will get this warning about windows protecting your pc because they don't have their publisher status here registered with microsoft so we're just going to click run anyway because i trust the source and we'll let that setup process begin here we'll just minimize things and wait for the setup screen to come up we'll answer yes to this question here and then we'll just go with the defaults for installation and there we go and this will just take a second to install now when this is done i believe we will see the sync traceor app showing up in the taskbar here so we're going to click finish and what should happen now once things are finished is that it should appear there it is down here we're going to allow access to the firewall here so we can transit data back and forth and uh we will answer no to this question now the nice thing about the sync thing interface is that it's identical across platforms so if you're trying to walk through somebody on the phone as to how to set this up they're going to be seeing the same thing that you see regardless of what platform they are on which makes it a lot easier to help people through this process now in order to connect this windows machine to our mac we need to get the identifier here of the windows machine so i'm going to click on actions here and go to show id now this identification number is unique to this installation of sync thing they say this is safe to transmit to people so this is something you could email to somebody for example because there are some layers of authentication that have to happen before we allow files to be shared one thing to note is that if you are making use of their discovery and relay servers which i'll discuss a little bit more later it's possible to get the ip address of your computer from this number but beyond that there's no real risk here in sharing this identifier over perhaps an insecure connection of some kind what i'm going to do here though is just copy this into the clipboard and pretend like we're emailing it and we're going to go over here to the mac and connect up to that remote computer now to do that we click on add remote device and you can see here there's an option for the device id which we are going to paste in now if you have other sync thing clients on your local network those clients will appear here on the screen which makes this process a lot quicker so if you had a friend that you wanted to sync with if they brought their laptop over to your house and connected to your wi-fi you would see them on there and you can begin the chain locally or you can paste in the identifier like we're going to do here and i'm going to call this remote windows we can call it whatever we want and i'm going to click on save and what you'll see here now is the remote windows option showing up here on my list of remote devices so to recap what we just did here we got the identifier from the remote computer and we pasted it into our sync thing installation here on the mac and now we've got it showing up here now you'll see here that it says disconnected and the reason is is that we have to approve the connection on the other side here so let's go back to the windows machine and as you can see here we got a notification telling me that this device wants to connect do you want to allow that so this is where if somebody got a hold of your identifier you would just click ignore and the connection would not be made but here we definitely want this connection because we want to share files back and forth and i'm going to click on add device and when i click save here this is going to now connect us back to that mac so we can set up a syncing relationship here so i'll click save and what will happen now is these two devices will likely find each other through the internet initially it might show up here as disconnected but eventually the connection will get made now this cloud server i'm using is behind a lot of firewalls so we're definitely going through their relay servers to make all of this work and as a result the speed in which these connections are initially established might vary based on where you are but it looks as though here we're now connected and you'll see that the default name of my mac here is a bit too long so i'm going to click on edit here and we're just going to call this remote mac just to be a little more clear and this doesn't impact anything this is the name that i'm going to call this on the windows machine and as you can see now we are connected up here and communicating and if we go over to the mac you can see that it too shows itself as connected but you'll notice here that it says connected and unused and that's because although we've connected these two devices together we haven't yet shared any files between them so we're going to do that next now on the mac we already set up that folder for syncing here remember that the folder we set up in the sync me directory inside of my documents and what i need to do now on the windows side is set up a folder in which i want those files to sync on this end so i'm going to go over to the file explorer here and i think i'll do something similar to what i did on the mac which is create a sync me folder inside of the my documents folder so i'm just going to call this sync me like we did before so what i'm going to do now is tell the mac to share its folder with the windows computer so let's jump back to the mac here and what we're going to do is go over to edit under this master sync that we set up earlier i'm going to go to sharing and you'll see now that we have remote windows showing up here as a destination which i am going to click right now and click save so now we have that folder essentially being shared to the remote windows computer if we accept it so i'm going to go back here to the windows side here and it says the remote mac wants to share the master sync folder do we want to add that i'm going to say yes here and now it's giving us some additional options now what i want to do is put these files into that folder that i just set up so you could go with the default but i like to put things where i know they're going to be so to make this easier i'm going to go over to the file explorer and get the exact location of that folder so we'll pull up the explorer here we'll go back into the documents folder i will go to the sync me folder here and if i go up into the address bar i can just copy and paste this c users junk my documents sync me over to the folder path here let me just zoom back out again so you can see what this looks like and we'll just go ahead here and hit ctrl v to paste it in and now i'm going to click on save there's going to be more we're going to do with the share in a minute but to keep things simple just to start let me click on save here and get going and now you're going to see that on the windows side it says up to date and if we go back to the mac here it also says up to date pretty cool so now i'm going to create a simple text file on the mac and we're going to save that file in that shared directory and see if it makes its way over to the windows server in the far away place in which it is located so we're just going to say test file this is a test put a couple exclamation points on there i'm going to go ahead and save it and again what i'm going to do here is save this document in that sync me folder that we just created to share with that windows device there i'll leave it as a rich text document i suppose and click on save and of course just like any other file on our computer that we save locally we have that file here located in the folder but if we now jump over to the windows computer and look in its folder you can see we've got the file there now as well and i could add some text to it maybe i'll do that real quick and say adding more text from the windows side and we'll put an exclamation point there and then click on save here and that will update the file so now what will happen here is it'll sync back from here to the mac and if we go back to the mac and click on the file again we should see that updating pretty shortly once they do complete the sync and sometimes it syncs up pretty quickly sometimes it's a little bit delayed but there you go you can see things have synced up now just like other file syncing services you could run into a collision where you have a file open on one computer and then you open it up on another one remember we're syncing here and not sharing a single file so in cases where it detects a conflict it'll create a different version so you can go back in and review and then decide which file will be the most current one that's something that dropbox does and many other syncing services do and that's why i would say that this is best used for your personal use or files where you know that you're not going to have that file open in more than one location at a time again it'll do a pretty good job of managing this for you but you definitely want to be careful about having files open in too many places simultaneously now like dropbox you do have versioning available as an option and what versioning means is that as you change files a copy of the old file is saved and there are some settings that you can adjust to fine-tune this if you want so if you recall as we were setting up this master sync folder in the file versioning area we had enabled simple file versioning right now it's set to keep five versions of the file so what will happen here is that if we change a file it'll save a version of it and it'll keep the last five changes that were made to that file now these files will take up space on your local hard drive but they'll be in a hidden folder so when you delete a file for example it's still going to be there for a while because it's maintaining the versioning here and this does save you though that if somebody were to remotely edit a file and they did something really nasty to it you can go back and roll those changes back and to do that you click on versions and then you look for the file that you want to restore and then you've got a range of dates here that you can restore it to so for example i can go back to the original version here and click on restore it's going to ask me if i really want to do that and what it's going to do is move in an older version of that file and basically overwrite what we had before so as you can see here it has the original language of that file before we added text on the windows side and that's now been synced up to the windows computer now it's important to note here is that versioning is specific to each client so although i have versioning set up here on the mac if we go over to our windows machine here and pull up our sync thing thing let's go ahead and open up our sync thing settings and we go over to that master sync folder and we go to edit you'll see here that file versioning on the windows side is off so i can't roll back on windows at the moment but i can on my mac now if i enable versioning here i can apply those same settings so it will keep versioning on the windows side as well and this is a big distinction from dropbox because dropbox has a central server that manages everything for you and you can adjust versions on any client that you're operating on but on sync thing you have to enable versioning on each computer and you have the flexibility to have different versioning running on different machines if you want but again it's something you have to enable on a client by client basis now like dropbox you can have sync thing ignore certain types of files on a per client basis so for example if i don't want to get quicktime files synced up with my laptop on my directory but i want another computer in the chain to get them i can set that up on the laptop to ignore those files another thing you might want to consider this feature for are some of the extra files that macs and network attached storage devices tend to drop into a directory so for example we are on my windows computer right now and i've got this ds store file here that just showed up after i copied the sync thing uh disk image over to my shared directory and this ds store file is something that mac os inserts as a hidden file on the mac side to tell the operating system what exactly it should do with one of these types of files but you don't want to see this all the time on windows so you can go in on a client by client basis and ignore those files let me show you what i have set up across all of my devices right now this is on my max file share on my desk and here you can see that i'm ignoring the ds store files and i'm also ignoring these files that my network attached storage device creates in its directories because these were popping up everywhere and really bugging me so when you have this in your ignore pattern setting here this will make sure that those files never sync up and you do have options for wild cards there's full documentation here we're not going to get into the weeds on this one right now but for example if i wanted to ignore every mov file i could type in star.mov and none of the quicktime files will get synced up with my computer when i'm on the road but these are specific to the client and if you want to ignore these ds store files everywhere you need to make sure that you have these exact settings on every single client now you saw how seamless it was to connect our mac here on the desk with the remote windows computer and it was doing that through sync things discovery and relay servers these are run by volunteers that have made their computer resources available to sync thing users and what happens when you try to do a remote connection like we just did is that the client here will communicate with one of those volunteer discovery servers to figure out exactly where the other computer is located and then it tries to set up a connection if it's able to get a direct connection great those two machines will communicate with each other that way if they can't communicate then it goes through a relay server which is also run by sync thing volunteers now we're not going to get into the weeds as to how to set this stuff up yourself today but you can set up your own discovery and your own relay servers and the information about doing that is in the documentation if you do get stuck through a relay there will be a bit of a delay in getting files from one place to the other will probably run slower because it is going through some other parts of the network but all of the data that you're sending out is encrypted before it's put out on the internet and of course you need to have that client on the other end with the right certificate to be able to get that data and know what to do with it so it's pretty secure but if you don't want to trust the sync thing relay volunteers to do this for you you can roll it yourself and get something going on your own if you so choose there are also settings here which i will pull up on screen right now if you go into the actions and go to settings here if you go to connections you can enable and disable these things and then configure your own so right now i've got everything on here i've got nat traversal the global discovery the local discovery the relaying and if i were to disable some of these things i may not have as seamless an experience getting my files to sync up over the internet but that option is available for you if you're very concerned about your security and want to make sure that your data flows in a specific way you have that option but if you want turnkey it's enabled by default and i found for an open source project this is working exceptionally well and i've been very happy with how effective my file syncing has been so far with sync thing so that's how i've been using sync thing to keep my files synchronized now that dropbox is kicking us freeloaders off the platform essentially and i'm quite happy i actually prefer this to dropbox it's working really well i have three macs a windows computer and my nas right now on a synced peer-to-peer thing going on and everything's been seamless i've been very very happy with just how perfect it's been for my use case now the one thing you can't do with sync thing is something that you can do with dropbox which is making links publicly available so if you ever had a large file to share you would often just go into dropbox and email a special link to somebody sync thing as far as i know doesn't do that so in order to get that functionality i'm using my google drive for sending large files but really i was using dropbox only for my own personal file syncing and for that purpose it's been great and i could of course maybe invite somebody into one of my folders to give them access to files too there is a lot more to sync thing though you can do one-way syncs and read-only stuff so we can maybe look at that those kinds of things in the future if you're interested so let me know down in the comments below what you thought about this what you'd like to see in addition to what i just did maybe we'll delve into this a little bit further with more detail in an upcoming video but i think i wanted to start with the simple side of things first get the basics going replicate that dropbox functionality and we can go into the weeds from there again let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time this is lon seiben thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters brian parker jim peter tom albrecht frank lewandowski mark bollinger and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don't forget to subscribe visit london tv s

Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 39,016

Keywords: Syncthing, How To, Howto, file syncing, sync, Dropbox alternative, Dropbox, Box.Net, do it yourself, DIY, Open source, files, directories, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: OHtVVT2JDd0

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021