Vladimir Campos

EN|PT

If you are not following the Syncthing-Fork drama, which, by the way, is not an official Syncthing Foundation app, here’s the TL;DR: the person who was maintaining the Android app is not in charge of it anymore, and it looks like people don’t know much about the new person, which is raising concerns about security.

I’m not familiar with the development history or many of the usernames mentioned in the discussion, so I’m not adding any more information to this post to avoid complicating things even further. If you’d like to learn more about the situation, there’s a topic about it on the Syncthing forum, which started on November 13th and is still going.

My plan for this post is to share with you what I’ll be doing about this situation.

Since I’m not technically capable of making sure everything is okay with the code of potential future updates, I turned off the Play Store auto-updates while I was waiting for things to calm down. That also gave me some time to think about what I should do.

What I’m worried about is the fact that Syncthing has to have access to all the files on the device, and to add insult to injury, the Syncthing-Fork app is not an official Syncthing Foundation app.

I was an Obsidian Sync user in the past and moved to Syncthing because of the number of files and the backup system I created. However, a while ago, my vault got so large that I had to set up Syncthing-Fork to sync just a few folders with my phone. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that may be the solution to my problems. I still need to ensure technical viability, but here’s my plan:

I was an Obsidian Sync user in the past and moved to Syncthing because of the number of files and the backup system I created. However, a while ago, my vault got so large that I had to set up Syncthing-Fork to sync just a few folders with my phone. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that may be the solution to my problems. I still need to ensure technical viability, but here’s my plan:

1. Go back to Obsidian Sync and set the selective sync to the same folders I’m synchronizing now using Syncthing-Fork.
2. Replace the Time Machine backup I currently use at home with something like Carbon Copy Cloner.
3. Since using different sync solutions may cause a conflict, I also need to establish some sort of mechanism that will copy that backup to the computer I have at my office located in a different part of the city. Maybe I can even do this with Syncthing for Mac, which is still a Foundation official app.

I was a Carbon Copy Cloner user in the past, but that was a long time ago. So, the first step of this journey is to download the trial version and learn what I can do with it.