Syncthing and Syncing (vs the Cloud!)
Hello
I recently got a new phone, this one with many perks over my old one - for example, I have more than 200 MB of spare storage space (actually around 100 GB in the base device, pretty nice). It also has a stylus (which is nice for signing documents, and other things hopefully to come)! And checking out the old Linux tube, and looked up a program I've heard about: syncthing. Why this app, and why sync?
Syncthing is an app that lets you sync across different devices! Now this doesn't sound crazy, if you have Apple devices, or have Googled or Dropboxed your life up, don't these things do the same thing? No, they rely on devices sharing a common repository on the cloud, and then pulling and pushing to the same repository. But wait - what if they just pulled and pushed from each other? As long as you don't care about being able to remotely access all of your files wherever you're at, even if somehow you don't have your phone and computer on you, but you have access to the cloud - then maybe the cloud is for you. By that situation I can't really imagine happening all that much to me, personally. So why not cut out the middle man, and just sync between devices?
The beautiful thing is, it just works. I personally haven't really used Apple's cloud that much (since when I had an Apple device, it was just an iPhone, so I didn't get the whole ecosystem experience), and in my Windows + Android experience... it's maybe possible to set up a slick system to emulate syncing with Google cloud stuff... but the infrastructure doesn't necessarily exist out-of-the-box. Certainly average joes aren't syncing between devices. If I had a picture on my phone I wanted, I'd put it on Google Photos (or whatever cloud service), and then log into it on my Windows computer - certainly not the slickest procedure.
Syncing just works. Using syncthing, you (A) open up syncthing on your computer, pull up the QR code for your device (no account creation needed, it just makes a unique code for your instance), and (B) scan that QR code with your phone. You say "yes I wanna sync" on both ends. You do a few steps (there are guides, so I won't go through them), and boom, you sync a folder or file between the devices. (tip: you will sync the contents of a selected folder, not the folder itself. So for example, if I'm trying to sync the folder 'literature' between my computer and my phone, I make a folder called 'literature' on my phone (Android right now, maybe I'll de-Google, we'll see how motivated I am, but this is working on a very vanilla set-up). Then I sync the folder 'literature' into the 'folder' literature; that is, syncing won't 'create' a folder called literature, it only syncs in the contents of the original folder - I messed up the first time and it synced all of the papers I've saved into the 'home'(?) directory of my phone, and I had to go back in and retry)
Now I have to mess around with it more before I say 'whoa, secure!', but conceptually why this is secure is that once you're done syncing, you just pause or stop the syncing between the devices, so there is no more activity. It's like closing the gates, and boom, the target has the files you wanted it to have. It's secure, and easy, and you didn't need to go through the cloud!
To make this website, I similarly use a syncing CLI program called 'rsync'. I have the contents of my website on my local computer, and then I rsync it with my web server to update it. It's pretty easy and clean!
Anyways that's my schpeal on that. I was pretty inspired by this app. A lot of times I find an app WAY more effective than the 'standard' application in Windows or Apple land, but it's largely because I'm CLI literate. But syncthing operates through a web GUI (although you launch it on the command line by typing 'syncthing' and pressing enter), and the phone app is, well, a phone app. So it should hopefully be intuitive to non-CLI-comfortable people. And it's just very nice and clear, doesn't require cloud storage, and you can feel more secure and safe. And efficient.
When to Use Cloud?
This isn't to say the cloud is useless - it's good as a central repository that many people can stably reference. But as an intermediary for syncing your devices, it is not, in my opinion, the most ideal solution.