[caconym_]

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions.

I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

[rincebrain]

How have you found syncthing's scaling?

I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.

[caconym_]

It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.

[hiq]

On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).

[gonzalohm]

I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)

[caconym_]

I actively don't want this feature and its appearance in Dropbox is one of the major factors that drove me to look for an alternative. Needing to constantly stay abreast of feature churn to make sure I understand how and where my files are stored is not for me, nor is reliance on the weird hacks they use to implement it "transparently" across different platforms.

I separate my files in Syncthing into different shared folders that sync to different sets of machines, and put stuff that doesn't need syncing at all on my NAS. On paper this might sound more complicated but in practice for me it's a much lower mental burden.

[gonzalohm]

That makes sense. But Dropbox was never designed like that. It has always been a client-server service. Syncthing is P2P so it's not a replacement.

[caconym_]

I run Syncthing in a hub-and-spoke topology where the hub is a headless VM with a volume hosted on my NAS. This is half for my sanity wrt remembering what's peered with what, and half because it works much more consistently across network boundaries.

The way I use it, it's a 1:1 replacement for the way I used Dropbox: a directory of files that are continuously synced across different machines, with a durable central copy that gets regular snapshotted backups. I understand that Dropbox has more features now, but that's pretty much all it was when I started using it; and the fact that Syncthing supports other use cases than mine doesn't mean it isn't a perfect fit for mine. Out of all my experience self-hosting ~replacements for consumer cloud services, it's probably been the most successful by far.