A decade ago I used BitTorrent Sync. Then it became Resilio Sync. Then with Resilio Sync 2 they nerfed the free app to a point that I just removed that from all my computers and switched to syncthing.
Yesterday I was watching my server struggling when syncthing was doing the periodic scan of a directory with hundreds of thousands of files and then i thought, “maybe Resilio Sync uses less resources or doesn’t waste time reindexing a static directory for the nth time”
I went to see their website and now with the new version 3, all the features are back. The business plan now is to sell the app to enterprises at unaffordable prices rather to persuade consumers to pay a subscription to self host their syncing server
I wanted to try it but now they say docker version is discontinued, need to install the package to bare metal. Ugh… So I desisted and decided to stay with syncthing
Now with the news of the impending discontinuation of syncthing android app, everything changes. Without Android support, syncthing is no more irreplaceable for me.
So, has anyone tried Resilio Sync 3? Is it good?
My experience has been pretty good. In terms of functionality they both effectively do the same thing, but the one thing that makes Resilio Sync slightly nicer than syncthing is that I can just give out key for directory that I want to share - similar to a torrent magnet hash. Whereas with syncthing I have to connect and allow multiple devices together in order to sync between them - with Resilio Sync I just give out key and device can start downloading/seeding content. That may not be a big deal if you have a few personal devices, but if you’re distributing files with a number of devices you don’t know (as you typically do when torrenting) then you can just leave key out for anyone who wants the content.
As an added bonus, compared to a traditional bit torrent client, Resilio Sync allows you to update the content in a given directory and the users in the swarm will also get the new content without any additional work.
So far myself and a small private community are using it to archive about 2.5Tib worth of data that continues to get regularly updated - never once had an issue.
One other nice thing with Resilio Sync is that it supports selective sync on an easy per-folder/file basis. While you can sort of do this with Syncthing by using ignore lists, it’s much easier with Resilio since you can just right-click/open files you want to keep on your device.
