Syncthing

As part of a larger project to get off clouds and platforms I needed a solution to easily share data between devices that was previously being shared via some cloud mechanism, notably: passwords, documents, and various other files. With a quick web search it looked like the kids these days (2025) were using Syncthing. It has downloads for Linux, Windows, and Mac and has an Android app calls Syncthing-Fork.

Setup is pretty easy, everything handled through an installer of some sort. Once installed you go to http://127.0.0.1:8384 and sharing folders and enabling devices is a point-and-click exercise. It can find other devices running syncthing on the same network.

Setting up on a server was slightly trickier. On Linux Mint I installed with:

apt install syncthing

Enabled it as a service running under my user:

systemctl enable syncthing@josh.service

and added it to system startup

systemctl start syncthing@josh.service

While you can setup all linked devices and shared folders at the command line and by editing files, it's much easier to do via the Web UI. However, it's not immediately availble when installed on another machine for security reasons. It can be setup with a password for the UI and it can probably be configured to listen on an external interface. But you can also forward a port:

ssh -L 8385:localhost:8384 nub.local
			

And then access it locally through that forwarded port:

http://localhost:8385/
			

Note: use a free port on the local machine, 8385 in this case.

Now whenever I save anything to ~/Sync on one machine, it automatically ends up on ~/Sync on all other machines, including my phone! It's not always instantaneous, and on the phone I sometimes have to restart the service.