File syncing keeps coming up on MPU and other places. It is important to me since I have a desktop and laptop MAC and I also need to share files with my wife on her MBP (leaving out iOS devices initially but they are important also).
I started my syncing journey around 2008 with SugarSync. It actually was quite good and I keep with it for quite a few years. Eventually they started fizzling out. Reliability seemed to drop and then they were sold eventually things just got a bit wonky.
(Note: I have always avoided Dropbox. Don’t ask me why, I am not sure I can say. But I have.)
The next step was Resilio. This was interesting although somewhat fussier in some ways. But it worked and was fast. Along the way I added a Synology NAS to my portfolio and Resilio ran on that so it was all cool.
At some point I got disenchanted (unenchanted?) with Resilio. I can’t remember why.
I switch to Synology Drive. And have been using that for around 5 years and I am happy. Unlike Resilio it is not peer-to-peer, everything syncs through my NAS, but that being said, it is very fast and reliable. I have about 6 folders shared between my iMac, my MBP, and the NAS, and one of them is also shared by my wife. Moving a file into any of those folders results in it appearing almost immediately in all of the other places – I can drag it in the folder on my iMac and turn to my MBP and start editing. Nothing is foolproof and every few months something isn’t sync’d fast enough and I end up with a “conflict” file. But in view of the dozens of files (sometimes hundreds) that I update daily, having a conflict every few months is noise.
Running Synology Drive on my iPhone means that I can see all of my files from my iPhone so that isn’t a problem.
Bottom line… If you have a Synology NAS and need to sync files between multiple systems, Synology Drive is free and is a very reliable solution and I highly endorse it.
Glad to hear Synology has gotten their act together. I had a miserable experience with it myself. I bought one years ago, back in 2015, and it was so slow it was unusable. I battled with it, given how expensive it was, but eventually gave up on it. That said, it was the cheapest model they made at the time. But still, I could never understand why it would choke just loading it’s web UI.
The cheapest models use an ARM processor and have very little RAM. They’re only really suited for accessing directly over the network via SMB. Trying to run any apps on them grinds them to a halt - at least initially whilst trying to create thumbnails and run indexing etc. It’s unfortunate, but the cheapest ones aren’t great, even for home use. I say this from experience, having used to own one of the cheap J series.
In terms of the Synology Sync, I’ve not been a fan when I’ve tried it and I’ve stuck with Resilo Sync now for many years, as it just works. There was a period where I found it was blocked on certain networks due to the fact it was based on the Bittorrent protocol, but now I’ve not noticed any issues.
Funny you avoided dropbox, because I have been using the free version for well over a decade, not as my main syncing service for work but for some stuff that I needed in different places/devices (I was a windows user initially and it basically had the role that iCloud has within the Apple ecosystem).
The reason I mention this is because all the syncing services we went through at my work (Box, Citrix Sharefile, Onedrive/Sharepoint, did I forget one?) were unreliable and made me either lose data or duplicate data (because I had to re-sync from scratch and it wasn’t clear whether the old folder contained something that wasn’t in the cloud). The only service that has not failed me over all these years is DropBox. ”It just works”, as they say (unfortunately the same does not apply to iCloud). OneDrive is driving me nuts almost every day at work and I’m hoping the indications that the IT-dept will allow us to also use dropbox (they want leverage when negotiating with Microsoft) will materialize.
If Synology works for you, fine. But if you ever need to use a commercial provider, give Dropbox a try.
I don’t have a Synology NAS but am planning to try NextCloud on my HomeServer. Any experiences with that?
Yes - I believe that’s what I had, a J Series. And even in my home, 1GB ethernet network, it was really slow. Would choke on its own web UI half the time. I am very happy with Unraid. Much cheaper too.