Syncthing

I did a lot of reading and exploring over my holiday break. One of the things I'm most excited about is finding Syncthing. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look. It's like and open-source decentralized Dropbox.

It works everywhere, which for me means Linux and Android. Google Drive famously has no official Linux client which is a big PITA. Even the install on my ARM-based raspberry pi was simple.

Right now I'm using it to sync photos from my phone to my laptop. That sounds trivial, but it's turning out to be a game changer. It's really cool to snap a picture on my phone and have it show up moments later on my laptop. That instant transfer makes it really easy to bridge the digital-analog gap. For example, I can scribble down a drawing, snap a photo, and incorporate it into a blog post near instantly. Because there's no third party server involved I have complete control over my data and the file transfers happen over my local network (which is really fast).

If you need to sync with machines outside your local network you can use a relay server. All of your data is encrypted in-flight so you're still in control of your data. I'm going to keep playing with it and see how well it works for team collaboration. For example, wouldn't it be cool to share a folder with a remote teammate so they can keep up with what you're working on? In terms of the Analysis Maturity Plan Syncthing would be great for distributing "indexed analyses".

If you add a centralized server (that you trust and maintain) and some bash scripts it feels like this workflow could support a collaborative digital garden without all of the overhead and review.

Anyway, maybe this is old news to you but Syncthing feels like a new super power to me.


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