[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.