How to sync desktop like onedrive, but not one drive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by mortalic@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world

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I'm currently running kubuntu 23.10 and have been distro hopping a lot lately. I'm going to continue to do so but the tedium of saving everything off is a royal pain.

Backup solutions across distro's don't always work, plus the overhead of backing up and restoring is almost more work than just copy/pasting most stuff.

In windows obviously, you're damn near forced to use one drive these days, and it made me wonder if there is a similar cloud service, or self hosted service that might accomplish a similar task.

I've got an unraid server I can use, and there are options there it appears, but the choices are almost overwhelming.

So I thought I'd just ask all of you, what solution mimics a cloud desktop like onedrive the closest?

EDIT: To be more specific, I'm mostly just referring to dekstop contents, Documents, Downloads etc, Not config data. Bonus points if I can add folders too.

EDIT2: Thank you everyone for your awesome suggestions! I went with syncthing. I also tried Mega which crashed pretty much instantly for some reason. Syncthing seems to be exactly what I need and I can just point it at my Unraid server.

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[-] nbailey@lemmy.ca 15 points 8 months ago

Nextcloud - slick web UI and good desktop app. Bit of work to install and maintain the server software but worth it imo.

Syncthing - barebones cross device peer to peer file sync. Simple but works great.

Most unixey option - just use rsync to do incremental backups of your homedir to your server with a crontab. Easy and simple.

[-] DichotoDeezNutz@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

Another vote for syncthing. We actually use it at work to setup DR when an app doesn't natively support it.

[-] mortalic@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I saw nextcloud, and yeah it's setup is a lot for what I want. I haven't seen syncthing, I'll take a look. Thank you.

[-] Xiaz@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago

syncthing is what I use to replicate projects, notes, etc between my linux desktop, macbook, ipad and cell phone.

Everything routes into my plex server so I have one authoritative register of changes. If all you want is to tell a program “backup this folder”, can’t get much more straightforward than syncthing

[-] Tippon@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean when you say you have your Plex server as a register of changes?

I've got my PC as a read only source for my music, with everything else copying from that and syncing with each other. That lets me put new music onto my PC, organise it, and send the changes to my network. Is there a better way to do it, or something I've missed?

[-] Xiaz@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I have had a mesh setup end up with one device throwing old files across the entire mesh and it took me an entire hour to fix and get replication working correctly again. So right now I have all devices connecting to my plex server only, no mesh. If a device updates, it goes to my server then propagates to my other devices.

This lets every device be able to update a file or pull back updates. Because the plex server is the sole adjudicator of changes, I dont have to deal with any file mismatches or keep a single source as read-only.

[-] Tippon@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

Ah, I get it, thanks :)

I tried doing it that way at first, but because my wife's laptop is only used occasionally, I was getting the errors from that. At the moment the mesh is working for me.

Next week might be different though 🙈

[-] Xiaz@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

While eating lunch I remembered network topologies. I am using Syncthing in a Spoke network. The hub knows all endpoints. Each endpoint knows the hub, but doesn’t know there are other endpoints.

[-] mortalic@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I like this idea, I'll take a look at syncthing for sure

[-] mortalic@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I went with syncthing. Looks like there's already a binhex docker I added to unraid, set them both up to sync to the unraid server and it's done.

One question, for you syncthing experts? Is it pretty safe to just sync my /home/user folder? Or is it going to take all the hidden files and stuff to across distros? For now I'm just syncing a few targetted folders inside /home/user folder.

[-] M137@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I haven't used or know much about the onedrive cloud desktop, but would mega work for you? I use mega for all my cloud storage with auto syncing, and you can choose whatever folders you want to be synced. Free is 20 GB, and what I use is 2 TB of storage and 2 TB of monthly transfer for $10/month. They use use zero-knowledge encryption. Here is more info, including their security whitepaper if that's of interest: https://mega.io/security
I've used it for close to 10 years now and am very happy with it, never had any issues.

Sorry if that isn't what you're looking for, but hope it's right!

[-] Doombot1@lemmy.one 3 points 8 months ago

I mean, if you’ve already got an Unraid server, why not just throw together a network drive and just mount that in whatever distro you’re using at the moment?

[-] mortalic@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

This is what I'm doing, but I was hoping for something a little more seamless.

[-] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 2 points 8 months ago

I can think of lots of reasons not to use it, but dropbox does what you want including shell integration it's pretty much identical to onedrive on windows (in mint anyway, so i assume ubuntu as well)

[-] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago

My problem with dropbox was it only has the one folder it "syncs".

I was using Google drive on windows before the switch and I could tell it to sync any random folder on my computer, on any of the 7 drives... The Linux client for dropbox wouldn't let me do that and I had more stuff I wanted backed up than fit on my main drive.

The best alternative I have found was kDrive by infomaniak. Servers are in Switzerland, so it takes a bit to upload the initial sync when it's as big as I needed, but the day to day syncing changes is not noticeable. Linux client is great, and it's an appimage (I believe?) so it should be pretty much the same on any Linux distro.

[-] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 1 points 8 months ago

Oh there's a long list of reasons to not use it. I use jottacloud with rsync personally. Dropbox does however provide that basic integrated functionality in a noob friendly way.

[-] mortalic@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I forgot about Dropbox... I do have an account but yeah they are a bit too much, in the way these days.

[-] Ashiette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 8 months ago

If you want cloud, if you have a RPi somewhere, you can add PiVPN and from there you use syncthing from anywhere.

this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023

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