Syncthing

February 08, 2025

Intro

I initially started investigating Syncthing as a possible tool to help me move away from iCloud Drive as my solution for document syncing between my devices. At first it worked fairly well, but then I just kept hitting random issues. Ultimately, I found a slightly different use for the application that has been working very well for me.

First attempt

I enjoy using Fedora with KDE as a workstation and wanted an easy way to access my personal files while at that machine that wouldn’t interrupt my file access on my MacBook and iPhone as well. Syncthing worked well on my Linux workstation and MacBook, but the iPhone and iPad were a different story. I used the Mobius Sync app. It would typically work, but I found that my files would continually be out of sync because I hadn’t opened the app recently. This isn’t really the fault of the Mobius app but more a limitation of iOS. Still, it was frustrating enough that I ultimately moved back to iCloud Drive “with a twist”.

Moving away from Backblaze backup

I have been wanting to ditch the yearly subscription for Backblaze backup for a while now. After working with Syncthing, I had a revelation on how to accomplish this. I installed Syncthing on the MacBook and my NAS. I configured it to sync my documents, desktop, and photo library (iPhoto) to the NAS. This was setup for both mine and my wife’s accounts on the laptop. I then setup the NAS to upload these files nightly to Backblaze B2 storage. Using Synology’s Hyper Backup application, I can control the number of versions I keep backed up. Since I don’t have a ton of data , this resulted in a significant cost reduction from paying the yearly subscription for their backup application.

Access from the Linux workstation

I setup Syncthing on my NAS as receive only for the iPhoto library, but left it standard for the documents and desktop folders. I then installed Syncthing on my Linux workstation to sync those two folders. I mostly just wanted access to files from Linux, so this works well. If I happen to create/update a file from Linux, it will not show up on my iPhone/iPad until the MacBook syncs it from the NAS and updates iCloud Drive. This is something I can live with for know though.

Note about Linux install

Syncthing can be installed by simply using your distro’s package manager. If you are installing it on a headless Linux server, you’ll want to edit the configuration file (~/.local/state/syncthing/config.xml) so that the service listens on the local IP address of the server and not just localhost. The other option would be to port forward via SSH. The Syncthing service can then be started by executing sudo systemctl enable [email protected]. Be sure to change “user” to the user that you want to use for Syncthing.

Conclusion

So far, this is working great. I would still like to move away from iCloud Drive at some point in the future. My next attempt may be to store all documents on the NAS, use Syncthing to keep a copy on my MacBook and Linux workstation, then access from my iPhone/iPad using an SMB share. My mobile devices are always connected to my home network via VPN anyway when I’m away, so this might actually work out well. Hopefully I can give a trial run soon.