In my experience, syncthing works as advertised, however the UI is a bit of a mess(as many open source projects have).
Especially the android app. The status of what the program is doing at the moment is not communicated very well. The refresh rate for status updates seems to be very low, and so you have connection status being disconnected, then jumps to connected after a few seconds of frustration("why isn't it connecting!!"). Then it sits there at 0% ("whats wrong!), and jumps to 64% after a few seconds, then 99%. Then sits there("is something wrong?"). Eventually it finishes and everything is fine("yay it worked!").
Love the project. Hope they get UI experience down though, as it is the main thing holding it back in my opinion.
While nextcloud has a lot of features, a kanban board, caldav and all the bells and whistles, what it lacks is a usable file sync feature.
The bugs have been open since way before the thing was called next cloud, but they have not been addressed. What you're stuck with is a "sync" client that opens a new connection to the server for every 4kb file you transfer. If you have a lot of those, it's lights out.
Syncing my document folder would have taken several weeks with nextcloud, it took less than half a day with Seafile and Syncthing.
> +1 for Nextcloud. The last versions are stable, well designed and really easy to install and maintain.
I agree on all but the last part. They only provide step-by-step upgrades, so when I finally realize it's time to upgrade I'm so far behind that it's much easier to nuke the instance and start from scratch than do the ten upgrades one by one. I'm sure this isn't a problem for more diligent maintainers though.
I used to have the same problem. Then I discovered NextcloudPi which automatically updates (and has other nice things like automatic setup for Letsencrypt).
When used as these directories will eventually be in sync it works great. When the user expects something to sync this second with visual confirmation it does not. In fact syncing too frequently automatically would be nice for the ui but bad for battery life on mobile.
Maybe it just needs a connect and sync now button for users to hammer.
Especially the android app. The status of what the program is doing at the moment is not communicated very well. The refresh rate for status updates seems to be very low, and so you have connection status being disconnected, then jumps to connected after a few seconds of frustration("why isn't it connecting!!"). Then it sits there at 0% ("whats wrong!), and jumps to 64% after a few seconds, then 99%. Then sits there("is something wrong?"). Eventually it finishes and everything is fine("yay it worked!").
Love the project. Hope they get UI experience down though, as it is the main thing holding it back in my opinion.