gemini://gem.lizsugar.me/2024/03/11/syncthing.gmi

These days it's pretty rare to discover a new tool that does so much for me and is just easy to set up. So I'm always super excited when it happens.

I've been a big user of Obsidian and their official Sync service, which Sync is a paid service – Obsidian itself is free. I used to keep a journal in it, my writing, tons of notes, almost a personal wiki even. It's really good for all of that, but it started to get very overwhelming for me so I pared back greatly. I moved back to fountain pen and paper for my journal and I realized that I honestly don't need to keep a ton of notes. I've moved back to Google Keep for incidental or temporary notes. It's just far more accessible being on my phone. Obsidian is on my phone too, but it's not as smooth of an experience to just scrape the foam off the top of my brain and fling it somewhere (to borrow a phrase from my wife about why she was gonna miss Twitter (this was before BlueSky came around)). Obsidian as a whole feels geared more towards longform writing and forming connections between writings.

Nowadays, I use Obsidian to draft posts for my website and gemini capsule. But I had to find a new solution to Obsidian Sync since I haven't pulled a paycheck in two years. I had seen Syncthing talked about a lot, and after struggling with some Obsidian plugins that do syncing via other means, I decided to use it as a more agnostic solution.

It was absolutely painless to set up and configure. Perhaps the biggest point of confusion I had was the way it's packaged in winget. But I was even able to find a Windows tray client written in Qt to help manage and monitor it. On the TrueNAS side of things, setting up a BSD jail and getting pathing and permissions working with the host datastore was the most annoying. My phone was actually the easiest set up, though I find it funny as hell that the main form of management is via a locally hosted web server on my phone. And then even my little RG353V emulation handheld (via the JelOS custom operating system) has Syncthing installed and ready to configure! But that's a teaser for later.

Syncthing is far better than Obsidian Sync for my needs: First off, I don't need to launch Obsidian to start a sync anymore! It just does it in the background, whenever I'm on wifi and have enough battery, and a file has changed. Which means I can now author a post entirely in Obsidian on my phone then publish it using Jekyll from the command line without ever having to open Obsidian on my laptop as doing so just to perform a sync operation was a bit of a drag. Or, I can switch editors entirely on both systems without issue.

This may seem a bit confusing, but I feel like it has also made it easier for me to maintain multiple Obsidian vaults too, as it's all just done at the filesystem level now instead of the app level. A "vault" in Obsidian is your collection of whatever you're doing in Obsidian. Configuration and plugins are also per-vault, so you can have a vault geared towards school, one towards fiction, and another towards your tabletop game (people have created so many plugins and templates for doing tabletop gaming in Obsidian, it's wild). As such, I've created a new "writing" vault to which I've moved my development log from Blarfnip's JRNL, as well as some story ideas I had in Google Keep.

And then here's where it gets really cool for me. I have a drop folder that I sync to my phone, laptop, and RG353V. This allows me to move files to devices just by, dropping them into a folder. I can easily add new ROMs or ISOs to my handheld. I can move a downloaded zip from my phone to my computer. Etc.

My phone now sends all its screenshots to my computer's screenshots folder. And further, my emulation handheld sends _its_ screenshots to my phone and my laptop. Getting screenshots of games off of that thing used to be a tedious copy process using samba. Now, it just, goes. Without me doing _anything_. I'm also using Syncthing to back up my game SRAMs, memory cards, and savestates to TrueNAS, in case the janky SD card finally dies. And I can easily extend this to allow me to continue my games on our TV computer or my laptop. This really opens up some major opportunities for emulation convenience!

This is a lot of words to say: I immediately fell in love with Syncthing, its ease of use, and it's many applications. If you need an easy to use synchronization software, I'm joining the already numerous voices saying: "Use Syncthing!"

Syncthing

Some Background

Moving On

Extra Fun

Conclusion