So I live in two places and thus spend time away from my great ubuntu 10gb networking NAS. But I really would like to have some files synced for when I’m at the other location so I can work on a synchronized backuped network drive.
However I haven’t been able to find any programs that allows for bidirectional sync over FTP/SSH/(any other long distance file transfer protocol). Except for ones with subscription fees which I’d rather not do because then I would be done with buying a dropbox subscription.
What am I overlooking as I can’t imagine that the only option is rsync as that doesn’t even allow for bidirectional sync.
Sorry it is 23:24 in my timezone so I’m kind of zoned out after trying the whole day to get it to work and thus forgot to add relevant detail.
I have a ubuntu 18.04 server at home #1 with my main data and certain parts of that data I want to also have available to me at home #2. I would like it to be that if I edit at #1 or #2 the data is updated in either direction so they stay in sync.
I thought that a synology nas would be an easy solution to this so I bought a DS115j for this duty.
It wasn’t that expensive so if need be, I could deploy a full ubuntu box.
This might be a potential solution, the other one I use at work is called BestSync which looks like software that belongs in 2005, but it gets the job done.
They’re not opensourced though, which in kinda a downside.
I did find goodsync but they require a subscription (or at least that is what I understood) so that doesn’t work for me. I should’ve been clearer in my post.
It is what I generally use when I want a full copy of a directory (including subdirectories) on more than one machine.
Keep in mind that with Syncthing is that it overall makes your data a little bit more vulnerable, because if either machine gets ransomware or a bug somewhere that deletes/corrupts files, than it gets synced to the other machine. So basically, keep multiple backups in other places.
I’ve looked into synchting but wasn’t that comfortable with it in the current setup. It seems that support for synology is done by competing camps and not necessarily consistently stable.
Unison seems fine but I’m not really looking to be supporting my own deployed binary as that might require constant monitoring to see if and when it breaks. Which is exactly what needs to be done if I stick to the synology nas. So if I ever upgrade it to a standard pc, I might do it.
So to use a Dutch turn of phrase, I’ve chosen eggs for my money (which roughly translates to cut my losses/accepted less than I initially wanted) and settled for a rsync from my source to the nas. On the nas I’ve set up a read only user to connect to the nas so I can get the most up to date data from there but if I need to update something I need to push it back to the remote origin. This at least gives me local data access and allows me to quickly work on stuff while keeping the system fairly easily usable with standard tools.
And because it was convenient to set up, I’ve set up a hyper backup on my data so I have snapshots of the old data on this off-site location.
Thank you all for your thoughts, I really appreciated it.
Options like Syncthing, Gs Richcopy 360, and Resilio Sync, all are good options, especially if you want more advanced features at a reasonable cost compared to subscription-based solutions, and also tools that enhance rsync like Duplicati and Unison are good choices for your bidirectional NAS syncing needs and bidirectional file syncing over FTP/SSH for your use case.