> The amount of times I have managed to slightly misconfigure Syncthing and as a result it _deletes all my files_ is incredible.

That only happened to me once (when I was initially setting up Syncthing), but even once is too often for something like this.

The incredible part for me is that there was no clear indication in the UI that I was doing something destructive, I only realized that Syncthing was destroying my files because I was manually keeping an eye on it through my file browser. Surely deleting local files should require the user to first confirm using large warnings and red buttons?!

I double that. Some years ago I almost lost the entire synced state after adding a new device that hadn't synced anything yet. For some reason syncthing decided that the new device has the most recent version of the data and happily started deleting everything on the other peers. Thankfully I had a backup, and not all peers were connected. After that I concluded that syncthing is fundamentally broken.

I sync my org files using a low-tech solution: I have a .dir-locals file that injects a post-save hook that automatically commits changes to git and pushes them to the remote. It's stupid, but it works, and I never have to think about it.

I initially misread "I double that" as "I doubt that" and was confused by the rest of this comment

Maybe it is because I always do 2-way sync folders, but I've used Syncthing for over 2 years now without ever having a hiccup.

I do take regular backups to Blu Ray optical disks 'just in case' but have yet to have need of them.

I thought about doing that too, but BluRay discs are kinda small these days.

Ah yes, the typical problem of Open Source applications, especially ones without a company behind it.

The implementation of the actual sync is pretty good (I never had a problem with it).

But, the UI is not intuitive at all. Its hard to setup a new sync, and if you're not careful you can set it up in a way that deletes all your files without any warning.

While I've lost data to Syncthing too, I've also lost data by removing a Dropbox folder. I don't think bad UI is the sole problem of FOSS.

There are enough company-backed products with terrible UI to make your argument invalid.

Software UI is hard, that's it.

Absurd.

If anything, it is the UI of Synctying that allows me (sometimes) to try and protect some directories.

When the same thing happens with Dropbox, all my computers automatically lose all files because there is no way to force a one directional sync to one specific directory.

This did happen for me one time in the past, which turned me off Syncthing then. Since that time though, I've tried again and never had this happen. I assumed it was an edge case of some sort that they fixed, but you're saying you've had this experience recently? (As in the last year or two?)

As far as I know it was fixed, but yes it was last year or two (the receive only setting is very new). I had similar issues in the past, though.

This is why I use Git for this (running MGit on my Android phone). It's really not a huge hassle to do this manually once a day or so (maybe more if I'm doing some out of band stuff).

When doing this, I was always wondering how to name my commits, when I was in a good mood I wrote good and meaningful commit messages, but when it was not the case, I just slap "aaa". In any case, nothing prevents you to use both, syncthing for a more reactive sync and git as a kind of backup.

For "running" files I've rarely found commit messages to be all that useful and instead just like to diff head versus last week or something.

I have a git alias setup called "git autopush" that adds all, commits with a generic "[autopush]" message, and pushes to the upstream remote. I use this for my repos of "running" files like org files etc. I've modified it recently to require a config param to explicitly enable it because I'm afraid of typing it in work repos :)

alias gl='git add *; git commit -am"lazy"; git push'