I’m currently running kubuntu 23.10 and have been distro hopping a lot lately. I’m going to continue to do so but the tedium of saving everything off is a royal pain.
Backup solutions across distro’s don’t always work, plus the overhead of backing up and restoring is almost more work than just copy/pasting most stuff.
In windows obviously, you’re damn near forced to use one drive these days, and it made me wonder if there is a similar cloud service, or self hosted service that might accomplish a similar task.
I’ve got an unraid server I can use, and there are options there it appears, but the choices are almost overwhelming.
So I thought I’d just ask all of you, what solution mimics a cloud desktop like onedrive the closest?
EDIT: To be more specific, I’m mostly just referring to dekstop contents, Documents, Downloads etc, Not config data. Bonus points if I can add folders too.
EDIT2: Thank you everyone for your awesome suggestions! I went with syncthing. I also tried Mega which crashed pretty much instantly for some reason. Syncthing seems to be exactly what I need and I can just point it at my Unraid server.
Nextcloud - slick web UI and good desktop app. Bit of work to install and maintain the server software but worth it imo.
Syncthing - barebones cross device peer to peer file sync. Simple but works great.
Most unixey option - just use rsync to do incremental backups of your homedir to your server with a crontab. Easy and simple.
Another vote for syncthing. We actually use it at work to setup DR when an app doesn’t natively support it.
I went with syncthing. Looks like there’s already a binhex docker I added to unraid, set them both up to sync to the unraid server and it’s done.
One question, for you syncthing experts? Is it pretty safe to just sync my /home/user folder? Or is it going to take all the hidden files and stuff to across distros? For now I’m just syncing a few targetted folders inside /home/user folder.
I saw nextcloud, and yeah it’s setup is a lot for what I want. I haven’t seen syncthing, I’ll take a look. Thank you.
syncthing is what I use to replicate projects, notes, etc between my linux desktop, macbook, ipad and cell phone.
Everything routes into my plex server so I have one authoritative register of changes. If all you want is to tell a program “backup this folder”, can’t get much more straightforward than syncthing
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you mean when you say you have your Plex server as a register of changes?
I’ve got my PC as a read only source for my music, with everything else copying from that and syncing with each other. That lets me put new music onto my PC, organise it, and send the changes to my network. Is there a better way to do it, or something I’ve missed?
While eating lunch I remembered network topologies. I am using Syncthing in a Spoke network. The hub knows all endpoints. Each endpoint knows the hub, but doesn’t know there are other endpoints.
I have had a mesh setup end up with one device throwing old files across the entire mesh and it took me an entire hour to fix and get replication working correctly again. So right now I have all devices connecting to my plex server only, no mesh. If a device updates, it goes to my server then propagates to my other devices.
This lets every device be able to update a file or pull back updates. Because the plex server is the sole adjudicator of changes, I dont have to deal with any file mismatches or keep a single source as read-only.
Ah, I get it, thanks :)
I tried doing it that way at first, but because my wife’s laptop is only used occasionally, I was getting the errors from that. At the moment the mesh is working for me.
Next week might be different though 🙈
I like this idea, I’ll take a look at syncthing for sure