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.
Syncthing has been much more reliable for me. It syncs extremely fast, picks up changes nearly instantly, and just works so well I never really even think about it.
Nextcloud has caused outright data loss once for me (all of my data was corrupted by nextcloud and then synced to my devices, had to completely recover from a backup), and broken due to updates several other times. It’s overall very slow, and a pain to maintain through updates.
Syncthing will handle duplicates by renaming the older copy, and also has modes for versioning and deleted file recovery that you can enable and customized how you want to.
Thanks, I’ll give a try! I was thinking maybe I could use both: syncthing for devices and nexcloud to have a backup
Nextcloud isn’t a backup solution, so I wouldn’t go that route.
For backups look at Restic, Kopia, or Borg. They work great and are very lightweight.
borg is fab; i don’t think there is a mobile component tho?
restic iirc is complicated and more advanced
don’t forget rsync which is sync but is the basis of various back up tools
Why do you think that Nextcloud is not a good backup solution?
Backups means you have history snapshotted in time.
Nextcloud does have done simple file versioning and a “trash” for deleted files, so you could get some simple protection from mistaken deleted files. But it’s more “best effort” than “designed for backups”.
I had some files which rot away over the years, who knows which update borked them, i use it as a cache for real backups for important files
Because it’s a file sync program, not backup. There’s a huge difference between the two.
Backups are a snapshot of your files at a specific point in time, generally backups will be done incrementally and then compressed and deduplicated, so multiple versions of a file don’t take up massive amounts of space. Once a backup is taken it isn’t modified again, so you can just roll back to a point in time and restore your files exactly as they were.
Plus, Nextcloud has had at least one bug in the past that corrupted all the files stored in it, so if you didn’t have a real actual backup in place you were completely screwed because all the versions were corrupted too.