Kubernetes is today's poster child for this. The Hashicorp stack can do just about all the same things, but it just works so there's no cottage industry of consultants and no market for as-a-service implementations. Why promote something like that?
Agree very much. That's why I never let go of a chance to enavgelise Syncthing and its OSS ilk in other fields.
I would like to know, how are you using Syncthing to create local backups for WhatsApp database/msgstore (crypt14) and media files. You also mention 65GiB as your complete backup ─ have you tested it via a restore? If so, how?
Not the parent poster, but I also do this; I just configured Syncthing to share the /storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp (aka /sdcard/WhatsApp) directory. WhatsApp stores its daily local backup on the Backups subdirectory of that directory, and the media files are all in the Media subdirectory of that directory.
> have you tested it via a restore? If so, how?
I have actually used it to move all the WhatsApp and Signal data from an old phone to a new phone. Just have Syncthing synchronize these directories (with the same path) on the new phone before installing WhatsApp and Signal, then install and launch WhatsApp and Signal. When first launched, if that directory already contains a backup, both WhatsApp and Signal ask if you want to restore from that backup. Signal then asks you to type a long backup encryption key you should have written down somewhere, while WhatsApp asks its servers for the backup encryption key.
But to add, the message store the where the texts are stored. I usually keep it all. WhatsApp doesn't care about the media more than you do, so you can delete anything not needed, and now you have full text message history + important media on your new phone.
I have tested it while migrating across 3 devices and half dozen phone factory restores, so I'm fairly confident it still works. There are very ugly restrictions coming in future Android version with scoped storage and whatnot and I'm worried Google is finally going to cut me out. But until then, I keep mine.
I was evaluating Syncthing for 1-way, append-only phone photo backup, and my Google searches warned me away from this, talking about "unsupported" and "database corruption."
I assume you have not experienced this, but I guess I should have just read the docs and trusted them, instead of forum posts.
https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html
Same here. What do you use instead? I haven't been able to find a good open-source multiplatform project for backups/1-way sync.
They had a pretty reasonable (~$6) in-app purchase to unlock samba access, and the fact that it's a German GmbH means I'm slightly more confident they're not trying to copy all our photos to a dark data-vault.
Happy user so far, though it took some cross-checking against the samba share feel confident it was backing up reliably (I'm just particular about trust-but-verify :)
1) I like to minimize the number of APT repositories I use. Debian's and Ubuntu's are well behind on Syncthing versions. Every so often (much more rarely than before), they have breaking changes. As such, my phone can no longer sync with my computers. Perhaps the answer is that Debian should just not be packaging it, because they have such a conservative policy. I'm considering downgrading my phone's version, or building the latest version from source. Worst case I may add their APT repo but I'm not eager.
2) At least with the version I've been using, opting for local-only sync isn't so straightforward. It's per-instance, not per-folder. This means that I have to have my home server running it as local-only, even for small things that I wouldn't mind getting synced over the wire. It means that if I want to have a local-only directory shared between my phone and laptop, it has to go through my home server first. Unless there's a better way I don't know about.
Otherwise Syncthing has been pretty great. I like your no-delete thing, I did not consider that. I could definitely use it for photos.
What’s wrong with adding a first party apt repo for syncthing (or other software)?
Two things I like about it in particular, are
1. It can and favors syncing over local network. This has a huge cost savings in developing world. Even when you do have massive bandwidth, local network sync still has more throughput and lower latency. My music is shared between devices and if I add a track, it takes less than a second to appear on my other devices.
2. You can set conditions, such that delets can be ignored. Eg. I have a WhatsApp message+media backup going back almost 7 years now, ~65GiB. But I don't need all that on my phone. So I just disable syncing delets on my storage. Now my phone can get away with ~3 GiB of whatsapp data (only because I don't delete very often) and I still have complete backup in case I need it.
3. Absolute rock solid stable. At $DAYJOB we use syncthing to sync multi dozen GiBs of new data every day, total file count in 10s of thousands in about ~300 directories. And in past 5 years we have had about 3 instances where we had something that needed attention, out of which 2 were not syncthing's fault.
I've been using Syncthing for years and have absolutely zero complaints against it. Everyone with 2 or more devices should give it a try, just to see there are better options out there.