Markus Cisler

Switching from Dropbox to Resilio Sync

This post is already over two years old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions change. If you think someone or something is wrong feel free to contact me.

I've been using Dropbox since forever.

Really. I could not even find the date I registered in my mails. My account page on the website says that it must have been at least nine years. Back then I was still using Linux as my main operating system.

My first Dropbox device
My first Dropbox device

Last week Dropbox notified me, that it will stop syncing my stuff on Windows if I don't move my folder to a supported filesystem. With NTFS being the only supported filesystem I would either have to reformat my HDD or use something else to sync my files between machines.

I decided to look for an alternative, coming across Resilio Sync and Syncthing. The only reason I see to use Syncthing over Resilio is, that it's open source and the protocol is documented. But Resilio Sync can do encrypted folders and has a mobile app for iOS. So in the end I decided for Resilio Sync.

Hosting it yourself

While Resilio Sync can run just fine with just your two or more devices connected to each other, I decided to run another client on one of my servers as well. That way I have an always online node in my network that can sync files to the devices that are not always connected, my gaming PC at home for example. Also I used an encypted key on my server, it syncs all files but never sees the contents of them.

Currently it is running in Docker which makes deployment super easy. An example docker-compose.yaml could look like this:

version: "3"
services:
  sync:
    container_name: sync
    restart: on-failure
    image: resilio/sync
    volumes:
      - ./sync:/mnt/sync
    ports:
      - "55555:55555"
      - "8888:8888"

To set everything up, open port 8888 on your host in a webbrowser and follow the instructions. That's it.

If you actually want to run this, please think about securing your webinterface.

This has been happily syncing for more than a month now. I did not feel the need to use Dropbox again.