 Let's talk about Sync Thing. It's a very different kind of file sync application from Dropbox, Google Drive, and others because for one, Sync Thing is a peer-to-peer file sync application, whereas those others are centralized server-based applications. And there's a lot of benefits to file syncing this way. In fact, I think all aspects of the CIA triad are improved when you use Sync Thing over cloud-based solutions. Now, if you aren't familiar with the CIA triad, it's got nothing to do with the friendly glowing agents that introduce Kraken to the ghettos and send pallets of cash and weapons to terrorists in order to ensure our democracy. No, the CIA triad is an information security model that most organizations follow, or at least they follow some version of it in order to make sure that their critical data is secure. So the C stands for confidentiality, the I stands for integrity, and the A stands for availability. Those are the things that we want to maintain with our data. Now, when it comes to data that's stored in the cloud, the confidentiality that you have is basically just trust me, bro, because as we know, the cloud, that's just some other guy's computer. And so you can't really be too sure about what security practices are going on on that computer or whether or not that person is analyzing your data so that they can monetize it, which obviously, that's going to violate the confidentiality of your data. Now, even in cases where your cloud storage provider says that data is end-to-end encrypted and it's encrypted at rest, you can't put any real trust in that encryption unless the application you're using is open source because with a proprietary program, you can't be sure if good encryption is being used or if they're not just sending off the encryption keys along with your data to that server to decrypt and then monetize it. And the same issues apply to data integrity as well. Hacking can also be an issue for all three aspects of the CIA triad. And when you're talking about a cloud storage provider that's providing that storage to many different people and organizations, that's obviously going to have a much bigger target for hackers than you just keeping your own data synced on your own land. And finally, availability is always going to be worse when it comes to cloud storage because it requires an internet connection for one. So if you're off in the boonies, you're not able to access the files in your cloud, but with syncing, you can have everything just done over your land. It's also gonna be a lot faster. And you also have to hope that with cloud providers like Dropbox or whatever else, you have to hope that they don't go out of business or that they don't delete your stuff in order to make space for other people that want to use the service. That's pretty common with the free cloud storage plans. So now that you're red-pilled on all of the great features of syncing, let's go ahead and get started with the installation and the setup. So on Linux, SyncThing is most likely just gonna be available for you in the repos. So you could just install it from your package manager. And there may also be an init component that you need as well like SyncThing OpenRC or SyncThing Runit if you're using OpenRC or Runit. And on some more obscure distros like Artix Linux, you might also have to edit the SyncThing file that's in your EtsyConfD directory. And you want to change, well you wanna uncomment these lines for a SyncThing user, SyncThing group and SyncThing home directory and you want to go ahead and fill these out with your user and your group and stuff like that because by default, SyncThing is going to run as root if you don't do this. I think on some distros like when I was figuring this stuff out for myself, it seems like Gentoo does this automatically for you so maybe you can skip this step. But yeah, by default, SyncThing is gonna run as root and it's gonna put synced files in your root folder which you probably don't want. Now if you're running a more, I guess typical Linux distro that uses SystemD, then you just wanna follow the autostart docs on SyncThing.net in order to create a user service instead of a system service and then that's gonna make sure that SyncThing doesn't run as root also. And of course, if you're not using Linux, SyncThing is available for basically everything, different BSD distros, it's available for Solaris, it's available for macOS, and it's also available for Windows. And because SyncThing is free software, there's also forks that people have made like SyncThing Tray and this is actually a fork of another fork called SyncTraizor but this is a dead project. Notice how no commits have been made since 2021 and notice how there's 140 issues open that are not being closed that people just keep making for some reason. Yeah, obviously this is not being maintained. So you might want to consider SyncThing Tray for one over SyncThing Trazor if you're looking for a fork and generally this is something that people use so that they can get like tray icons for SyncThing and stuff like that. Like it says here that it has a tray application for Dolphin and Plasma but they also have it for Windows as well, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, Windows 10 and Windows 11. So if you're a Windows user, this might be something that you'd more prefer over the regular SyncThing. Now in order to really start using SyncThing, you can access its web GUI by going to local host 8384 in your browser and if this doesn't work for some reason or you get like page not found and stuff like that, you might want to take a look at your configuration file for SyncThing. This is my configuration file and when I first installed SyncThing, the port that was listed here was like port 43,000 and something so I just changed it to 8384 because like that's usually supposed to be the default. I don't know why mine was different but yeah, this is where you can change it here in the XML if you're not able to access the web GUI and this also has a lot of other settings that you can change in an XML format but you know, unless you really like this, you're probably gonna prefer to just use the easy web GUI. Now, when you first start up the SyncThing web GUI, you're gonna get this message asking if you want to allow anonymous reporting so I'll just hit no on that and you'll also see this notification that says GUI authentication set username and password so by default there is no username and password that's set for SyncThing. You know, when it's running on your computer you just go to localhost 8384 but if you wanted to bind this to a public IP, I'm not gonna go through it in this video but it is possible to basically set up your own cloud like where you can access this from the internet and if that's the case, you're definitely going to want to set up your GUI authentication or you know, if you're in an organization and there's a lot of other people that are accessing this and some of them you don't want to have access then that's another reason you might wanna do GUI authentication. Now, another thing you'll notice is that it says the default folder here is unsynced and you have options to add, you know, more folders and you can edit this and this is another really great feature that I think SyncThing has over Dropbox and other cloud solutions because instead of just creating one massive folder to sync everything to, you could pick and choose different folders that you wanna sync different things to and pick and choose what devices they get synced to and then you can also have very fine grain controls over the types of files that are getting synced from a folder, like it's just so much more control that you have over your synchronization than with Dropbox or Google Drive and again, I'll probably make another video going over those more advanced features but I just wanna show you how to get just regular normal files in going. Now to actually sync data between two or more devices they have to share these identification strings with one another. So these are unique IDs that just identified this specific device. Now if you were going to find SyncThing to a public IP or anything like that, you know, use it over the internet then you might wanna be a little bit more secretive with these device identifications so that you don't get random popups of other people's devices out there that you don't necessarily wanna sync with but if you're keeping everything over your land like I am then it's not too big of a deal and honestly it's not that big a deal to share it publicly either because you have to confirm on both devices before data can start being synced but just wanted to give you guys that little tidbit of information. So I'm gonna leave this up and well actually let me add the phone first because I'm pretty sure that it's going to pop up automatically, yeah, so you can see you can select one of these devices nearby so if you have SyncThing installed on another device and that device is on the same network then it's gonna show up here and you can confirm that it is the correct device ID so like on my phone for example I can show you guys here. I mean I don't know if you'll really be able to see it but that's the same device ID that was showing on the computer. So we'll go ahead and add that device and we'll give it a human readable name call it Pixel 6 Pro, save that. Okay so now down here it says disconnected unused because we have to now connect it on the Pixel's end so let me bring up this device ID and it's got a nice convenient QR code that you can scan with the SyncThing app from Eftroyd, oh my mouse is in the way. That's why it's not scanning. All right so we'll now name this Redripper inside of my phone. So that's what that looks like there. All right and now we can close this and now it says connected unused so in order to actually get files to sync I'm gonna send a file from my phone over to the Redripper. You have to configure that on the per folder basis. Okay so go back on the phone here so this is the only folder that I've got right now to sync a file from open camera. I know it says three of three files but there's only one file in that folder so if I tap on this I've got the list of devices right there that says Redripper and if I mark this actually let me switch to this view. So if I tick that on we should get a notification that Pixel 6 Pro wants to share this folder add new folder we'll go ahead and add it. Okay now this is another reason why you don't wanna be running things as root so by default it's gonna put things in your root folder if you're running as root but as you can see the till day character is gonna be used as a shortcut for home Kenny. So this is where it's gonna put things and you can actually change default settings so let's say if you don't want it to all go in fact actually I'll do that right now. We'll go to advanced actually not that we'll go to settings and edit folder defaults right so we'll go into that and then we'll say sync. This way things are just gonna be a little bit neater. Save then add so now you can see it's changed that to the sync folder and that's fine. Okay and it said that it was up to date and it's still saying three files, two directories but again it's really only one. So I'm not too sure what that's about. So this is my sync folder right here. Boom you can see the one image that's synced and it's just a image from this is when I was trying to test the soil at my farm with a home NPK testing kit which it turns out is not the best thing to use not terribly accurate but anyway there you go. You have seen sync thing in action for synchronizing devices across your land and like I said there's a lot more advanced stuff that you can do with this as far as creating different folders and stuff like that goes but honestly that's gonna be on a per user basis so I might just dabble a little bit in that when I show you guys how to bind it to a public IP and really turn this into a kind of your own cloud because you can then access it from anywhere on the internet. If you enjoyed this video be sure to like it and share it in order to hack the algorithm and check out my website base.win where you can get awesome merch like the little Damon shirt and of course you can save 10% store why to check out automatically when you pay in Monero XMR. Have a great rest of your day.