Unison. https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

It handles file conflicts, which is massively critical for anyone thinking of rolling their own. It also works over ssh, so it's encrypted.

Yup, I love Unison. Been using it for years at home. Though I've been worried that it's not being actively maintained. But I guess as long as it works...

I think their position is they no longer have someone paid to work on it, as the research phase has ended. But it is still maintained. Albeit, slowly. And them using a rather outdated website and svn to host doesn't really do them favors. They need to get someone in there to modernize it a bit. Switch it to git. Doesn't even have to be hosted on github, but somewhere more visible would help.

Syncthing.

After trying out Unison, Sync, and plain old rsync, Syncthing turned out to be the best of the bunch for me. Open source, modern interface, relatively simple to set up, seemingly quite secure... Hard not to like it.

Be careful with rsync, whose original purpose is mirroring, not backups. Specifically, if you're using it as a backup system of any kind, you want to use the --delete-after option, or else your receiver might delete the file before the sender even finds out the hard disk is corrupt (--delete-before is default, which is dangerous for a backup system).

You may also want to set the --max-delete option, to avoid the scenario where the sender doesn't have the volume mounted, resulting in the receiver deleting everything.

Be also aware that rsync is completely unencrypted, so you need to use it in conjuction with sshfs, ecryptfs, or some other method if you want security.

I think that he was referring to http://www.rsync.net/

Oh. Didn't know about that. That's a confusing company name ...

Their main product is backend storage that supports SSH+rsync, so, not really :-)

(You can also use other backup solutions, but I suspect most use the rsync transport, whether it's by itself or with Duplicity)

No, i was referring to plain old rsync, but this is quite nice!

I haven't "moved" yet (which is to say most of my data isn't synced, except for what I keep in Mercurial repositories, code, configs and notes) - but at the top of my shortlist (mainly for convenient access on mobile devices) is:

http://www.skylable.com/products/sx/

(Self-hosted, GPL)

Second place on my shortlist would probably be:

https://camlistore.org/

For syncing a mix of files, I'd probably not go for rsync, unision handles "real world" (messy) syncs across files better. For backup I personally use duplicity driven by backup ninja (encrypted with GnuPG). But I've yet to do any restores, so I don't really have backup yet ;-)

For anything tex-ish, Mercurial works fine for me. I'm not sure if git (today) is any less capable of handling small binary files -- I'm guessing not. But mercurial text UI/UX is much friendlier IMHO.

I have great hopes for IPFS, but personal/private use is still on the roadmap, so it's not usable for what I personally would need most. But I'm more and more confident they'll get there.

See these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10394403

If you tell us more about your needs, we could give more tailored recommendations.

"I humbly suggest people look into the following, and am eager for suggestions from other HN readers: - rsync"

rsync.net has a deeply discounted rate for new "HN" customers.

Also, we just enabled explicit support for attic/borg.

- SpiderOak

git-annex + cheap storage vps