I hear a lot about self-hosting and NAS etc. but why not just with an old laptop and a spare drive just put Syncthing on it and use that to sync between your desktop / other devices?
Self hosting seems way more complicated with having to get a static IP and opening ports etc. so why not just do this?
IPv6
Non server hardware, no ECC, no backups (one drive), no data writing consistency, manual updates and upgrades (syncthing isn’t cloud native and requires you to write non deterministic syncthing cli scripts) and so on.
Syncthing isn’t like using a cloud storage provider. If all you’re doing is keeping files on both devices, syncthing is a cleaner solution except for it not being great on phones. For sharing files or automated backups, it can get complex very quickly for many people or devices.
I use syncthing, proton drive and LAN sftp/ssh. My favorite is sftp because all my devices and programs can treat it like a local folder in the file manager. I mostly don’t need remote access to my services, but have been experimenting with adding it via podman wireguard. I’d be comfortable ‘exposing’ key based SSH to an unprivileged account, though I understand why people don’t want to do that.
Forwarding one port to wireguard or ssh, or using a cloudfare tunnel is not harder than a complex syncthing setup. I also don’t have a commercial style NAS. A laptop or desktop setup as a server seems to work fine. It has no trouble making podman containers.
My devices (especially my phone) don’t have adequate storage to keep large files in sync.
It also gets complicated between juggling multiple people, such as with family members.
Syncthing is also a battery drain on phones. And it’s also very unclear if it’s even still supported on mobile (or will be supported in the future).
It also means I’m basically locked to my other devices, which means no reliable off site backups when traveling.