As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.
I use syncthing and appreciate that it exists. It's way too easy to accidentally all your data, though!
I've been dragging my feet migrating a hard drive from my old desktop to my new one for 1.5 years. This past weekend I finally got motivated to power the old one up and wait for syncthing to give positive indication that it's in sync with my server. The reason that was even a concern of mine is that the last time I used that desktop, I spent a whole weekend cleaning up about 200 GB of renamed and duplicated "sync conflict" files that syncthing created and then synced to my server when I previously migrated hard drives. I wasn't sure if all the fixes had made it to the server yet. That required writing my own tooling to positively confirm every duplicate was bitwise identical before deleting one or the other.
The official documentation suggests I remove syncthing's metadata from the drive and then add it again on the new computer, and let it re-sync. It's a good way to check for bit-rot I guess. At least the documentation these days suggests marking one instance as read-only.
I've managed to delete a folder with GBs of important data because Syncthing has non-obvious ways of handling data. Thankfully, I have tons of backups of everything, so it wasn't a big deal, but since then I've been extremely paranoid when using Syncthing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
I do all my work with Syncthing in send-only folders, one per machine. Which means that if I make changes across machines then I always get duplicates, but the redundancy feels natural - it's only concerning if the data size becomes absolutely huge.
I'm really surprised by that. I feel like Syncthing would really benefit from a simplified user interface for its core use case, which I imagine is "sync one folder across multiple machines". It's really nice that they have all these additional features and detailed information on the default dashboard, but it can be really confusing if you cannot form a mental model of what the software does.
i feel it's a great example of software that doesn't get in your way.
I would've love to write about how awesome it is but came across this wonderful essay regarding the same titled _"Computers as I used to love them"_ [0]. Highly checking it out.
The last time I used syncthing to sync files from my android phones to my Linux server, it always somehow got stuck and never recovered. The phone app would stop running in the background and I would forget to rerun it and if it was started a long time later it would get stuck and would not recover automatically. Eventually, just stopped using it. Now I use Google photos and it works great to backup my family's phones' photos.
As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.