Thread by @ubersoft

I started investigating file syncing software when I got tired of trying to manage dual booting on multiple PCs with a USB stick.

Sometimes I'll be working on Linux on my desktop, other times I'll be working from Windows on my Laptop. Then Linux on my Laptop, then Linux on my PC again, until I realize I need to pop over to Windows for something.

When I'm in Linux, is relatively easy to retrieve a file I was working on in Windows, assuming Windows shut down cleanly which it doesn't want to do these days, preferring to hibernate instead because Microsoft is trying to make me hate all of existence.

One day I randomly discovered an HP laptop sitting in a briefcase in my closet. I mean, it was my laptop, but it was so old I'd completely forgotten about it.

It was so old it didn't support widescreen resolutions, is how old that laptop was. It was super old. But it worked! It worked so well I decided it would be criminal not to use it for something.

So I went out hunting for something that was "kinda like Dropbox, but that you run off your own equipment instead of putting stuff on the cloud."

(I have nothing against Dropbox, and in fact have used it for past jobs with zero issues, but why use the Internet when you can use your home network?)

So I used this thing called Bittorrent Sync, which was created by, you guessed it, the people who created Bittorrent. I put Bittorrent on Ridiculously Old Laptop and all the machines I do stuff on, and it worked like a charm.

I'd create a Help Desk comic on my Desktop (I was still doing Help Desk at the time) and it would update to every PC running Btsync that it was configured to talk to. The Ridiculously Old Laptop was running pretty much all the time, so it became the de facto "file hub."

If I shut down my desktop and fired up my laptop, it would connect to Ridiculously Old Laptop and start syncing, pulling down the latest files. It worked very well.

At some point Bittorrent Sync became Resilio, Resilio went commercial, and my computers started having trouble syncing with each other. Which I think was because the linux OS's were running older versions, but I don't actually know why. Anyway, I moved to Syncthing.

Syncthing is an open source app that does pretty much what Btsync/Resilio does. When I first came across it, it was pretty early in development and btsync was a lot easier to configure. When I switched it wasn't bad, and it worked great.

It also gave some extra features. Along with syncing files, I can figure specific file groups to store older versions. For example, my "Fiction" group (where I keep all my active writing projects) stores the last five versions of each file. Just in case.

Anyway, Syncthing is great. My setup was great. I was even able to sync my email client across all my Linux desktops. I've yet to find a truly cross-platform email client other than Thunderbird so Linux is where I pull down all my mail.

And with Syncthing it doesn't matter which machine I'm using, because it just pulls down the mail and then syncs it to all the other Linux environments when they sync up. Because symlinks are awesome.

Unfortunately one day the Really Old Laptop died its final death. It was, sad to say, an ex-parrot. Which meant my central hub went away, and my file syncing kinda broke.

Problem was, I really needed one machine to be on all time, doing nothing but syncing files. My desktop couldn't do that, because even though it was on a lot I kept switching OS's on it, and it can't sync with itself.

So I'd been looking for replacement file server for a while, but I didn't want to drop money on a full-blown PC just to do that.

Enter the Raspberry Pi.

A Pi is $35. A starter kit, which I bought, costs more than that, but it still doesn't break $100. I bought a starter kit (that came with a modified version of Debian, "Raspbian,"), a tiny keyboard, and a 7" monitor all for about $120.

$120 isn't exactly a trivial amount of money -- that's a utility bill. But a low end PC will cost at least twice as much, and that's without a monitor. And for storage, I just took an external USB drive and plugged it into the USB port.

Literally all I want it to do is sync my files. And the only thing I really need to worry about is when it overheats.... which it doesn't do when it's syncing files. No, that's not what makes it overheat. Do you know what makes my Raspberry Pi overheat? Well, I'll tell you.

The only time my Raspberry Pi has overheated is when I am using the Chrome browser. That's right. A WEB BROWSER.

It had no problems at all copying 170GB of files onto the USB drive, UNLESS I wanted to check on its progress (Syncthing uses a web interface for that). Then as soon as I opened Chrome it was all "gee it's getting hot in here. Is it warm? The room is spinni-"

...and then it would crash.

Thanks, Chrome.

Anyway. The Pi is neat, and I have a file hub again.