Hey just wondering if anybody has any experience in a decentralized cloud storage solution. Pretty much just a personal replacement of Google, Apple, and Dropbox services. I’ve been doing some research and it seems like a cool technology that I have not heard about until I went looking for it. So just wanted to know if anyone had experience with it, the pricing, and which one they recommended. Thanks you.
Syncthing + Raspberry Pi + Large SD Card + my other devices = good enough for me. It is a decentralized system in two respects 1) no corporation’s remote siloing and hoarding of your data since you are the “cloud” and 2) the system of Syncthing is also inherently decentralized requiring no central server (self hosted or not) as a critical point of failure to maintain a group file sync.
Doesn’t it use public servers to discover endpoints? What happens if those go offline?
I’ve been using it forever (10 years at least) and it’s impressive. Had very few problems (mostly forgetting a folder is part of a sync).
Even moving a sync job from one machine to another just works (I use a server at home as an endpoint for phone data, sort of a Syncthing “server”).
Yes but you don’t need them, you don’t need any internet at all, you can be in a log cabin on a totally local network.
What if you have endpoints on different networks and sync across the internet - doesn’t it need those discovery servers to enable that?
Or can you host your own discovery servers (think I’ve read that somewhere).
Yeah this looks like it might answer your questions on that stuff.
https://docs.syncthing.net/users/stdiscosrv.html
I never tried syncthing, I think I’ll try it now. Do you think it would work to copy my borg backup?
It should have no issues with syncing large files around, I keep 100’s of gigs in sync with it.
Otherwise, listen to arcterus - make sure you really think about how things are setup, otherwise you could easily sync a backup folder the wrong way, or cause an unintended deletion.
If you’re gonna use it for backups, you should ensure it’s only syncing in one direction. If it’s set up like normal (where it functions like Dropbox and syncs changes from any device to all your devices), if your data is corrupted or something on one device, it’ll be synced everywhere. You can also configure it to store a certain number of revisions (which you could use either instead of one-way syncing or in addition).
Also, if you’re gonna use it for backups, it’d be a good idea to store your data offsite somewhere (whether that’s by storing your data encrypted at some cloud provider through a VPS/whatever or at friend’s/relative’s place or something, that’s up to you).