I’d like to sync my markdown notes between devices (laptop and phone), which service is better: Nextcloud or Syncthing? Any other important idea I should know?, like latency times, or maximum number of synced devices, what if I edit the same note from both places without internet and then both get connected to a network… For example, I know Nextcloud let me have a history of the notes.
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Syncthing is fantastic… once you get it set up.
First, the rough stuff. Syncthing is not user friendly to set up and use. If you want to sync something, you have to go to every device you want to share with and enable the share… for every folder. You can get through this by doing the Dropbox method of just sharing a single folder, but that will have it’s own challenges if you want to only share certain files with certain devices or apply different versioning methodologies. All in all, it can get cumbersome.
Secondly, it’s a dumb sync tool, meaning that it’s not content aware. In your “editing the same note” example, Syncthing will fail. You’ll get a conflict notification and be prompted to to pick which version is correct… and even that will be buried in Syncthing’s interface that you’ll have to go looking for. That specific scenario isn’t what it was designed for.
Lastly, Syncthing will occasionally get hung up on syncing a file and clearing the error isn’t straight forward.
Alright now for the good stuff. Once you get through all the above stuff, it just works. I throw it on every computer, phone and tablet I own, and I get (mostly) worry-free backups of all my important files synced to my NAS. And it has saved me MANY times.
There are multiple versioning methods, so you can be sure that if you accidentally delete something, it’ll be there for you. You can set it to encrypt files on specific destinations, so if you wanted to sync to a VPC, you can ensure your folders are protected from prying eyes. You can exclude files, so those annoying .DS_Store files that macOS throws around don’t end up on your other devices.
I use it to backup my Obsidian vault, but I don’t use it to sync my vault to other computers. I pay for Obsidian Sync for that.
Thank you so much for such a complete answer!! I think I’ll give a try! BTW, why using Synching for different devices but not different computers?
I mostly agree with @shadejinx. I would add that when editing the same note on two separate devices syncthing will at least fail kind of gracefully in that you’ll whatever.md will still be there but you’ll see an additional whatever-conflict-hash.md along side it so you can easily fix it up. Synctrayzor for windows will give you a nice notification and UI with which to resolve.
Nextcloud is great but it’s a real behemoth. Loads of stuff you don’t need.
IDK what you mean exactly but I sync between computers and devices just fine.
best description I have ever read of syncthing. they should put this in their readme or about page. describes the pros & cons in an honest way. I’ve had all the problems you describe and will probably have them again in the future, be confounded, be frustrated.
I get (mostly) worry-free backups
except this; it’s sync not back up. ;) but it is very backup-like and in some situations does the job as well or better than backups
I <3 syncthing nevertheless
Sync isn’t backup, but proper versioning can be a very simple backup.
I use Joplin (hosted on my home Nextcloud server) and its very good, so far. I haven’t had it long. Nextcloud also has a native Notes app that is decent but not very featureful. Joplin works well for me, as I already had a Nextcloud instance.
I use syncthing, it works fine, but sometimes it doesnt sync, I have to open syncthing on my phone and also on PC to triger sync. If I open same file on both devices it just creates copy so you end up with 2 files Edit: I use obsidian for notes
A self hosted Joplin sync server is also pretty nice.
Git
Then git pull rebase and commit. Done
Does not have great UX on phones though.
I made some Termux shortcut scripts in bash for it. Works well, but not for everybody ;)
Never had merge conflicts I take it 😄
My phone script is quite simple, and I set it up on cron, so I don’t get out of state very often. I handle if there could be conflicts via script on my Linux pc with stash and pull etc. Automated cron also
Yeah, and for that reason, I opted for syncthing instead of Git for this use case.
I’ve not needed to deal with a conflict, it’s automated.
But what’s the latency with syncthing or its instant?
Syncthing uses inotify to watch for changes, so it’s pretty much instant
Since I use obsidian.md I installed a community plugin to sync to onedrive.
For other stuff I use syncthing.
Personally I’d just use something like trilium and call it a day.
I use syncthing for personal and work, and it’s great. Having said that I’ve found it struggles with versioning i.e. editing a document from multiple devices.
Look into something like Standard Notes for cross platform markdown editing. It’s e2e encrypted, works great, the dev is very responsive. Ymmv but I really like it, have it on every device I own and use it daily.
I’ve also just used a private git repo for editing docs from multiple devices. Once you get it set up it’s effortless, and most ide’s are extremely fun to use as text editors.
I have used both, and syncthing is the most stable in my opinion. But you will get sync conflicts/ duplicates if you work on the same file
For working on markdown files you should additionally look into https://silverbullet.md , it’s great 🙂. It has offline mode. But it will also generate duplicates if you edit the same file offline
