I need some help choosing a synchronisation programme for my small business (~15 people, in construction).
Our freelance IT technician who set up our OMV NAS has been hired by a large company and is no longer available, so as a partner who’s considered vaguely competent in IT I’m filling in for the time being. To be honest, I’m not actually competent.
I’m hesitating between FreeFileSync and Syncthing. I was thinking of using the former as I used it personnally a long time ago, but I’ve seen the latter mentioned on Lemmy.
The aim is to copy our data, which is stored in a commercial cloud, to our NAS running OMV. We’d do this via a Windows computer in the office where the cloud is always synced. The NAS is in my flat.
The copy would take place twice a week at predefined times.
Syncthing seems a bit overkill, but more modern than FreeFileSync.
If we choose Syncthing, we will make a donation equivalent to the cost of the FreeFileSync Pro licence.
Any advice to help me avoid any pitfalls in my attempt to set this up?
I have used both for a long time. Initially freefilesync, then later syncthing.
I have to say the difference isn’t great but syncthing is definitely nicer to use.
For one, syncthing can do more. The syncs are more efficient (it can send only changed parts of files, …), offer more customizability, it’s way more capable in networking, or when devices go offline intermittently.
Syncthing also runs a bit better. It is more like a service, I had to babysit ffs a lot in comparison. It also properly detects file changes, ffs’s “service” just triggered a full disk scan after a bit.
The webinterface is nicer than logfiles I had freefilesync dump on a dedicated nas share.
One mixed bag is that ffs has to work through network mounts, while syncthing has to work via its own networking (I can still share network mounts with it ofc). In practice there is no network share that is as efficient as syncthing, but it has the downside that syncthing needs to run on both sides where ffs only runs on one side.
On the other hand that automatically gives some checking since if one end dies the other will complain.
… Thinking about it more, in theory you could run 2 syncthings on the same machine, and give one network shares of one target and the other of another, then make them sync. That would keep syncthing traffic in localhost, essentially replicating ffs, if a bit clunkily.
Another potentially big thing is syncthing can do many-device shares. It even does fancy routing things balancing between nodes. This is probably a big deal if you wanna have say 2 backups (one could even easily be offsite, with no networking required except regular residential internet access).
ffs I would expect to become messy with more than 2 devices. I never tried, but I recall it being set up around having precisely one sender one receiver folder, so even cycling 3 scripts would probably break conflict resolution and also be a huge pain and perform poorly.
I was not aware that syncthing needs to be installed on both side. The NAS runs OMV and I didn’t find the extension in the plugin page of the dashboard. As OMV is based on Debian there is certainly a way but for the time being I will do things as simply as possible !