 So, one of the problems I've been trying to solve for a number of years now is syncing files across multiple devices, and when I talk about multiple devices, I'm not just talking about multiple computers, I'm also talking about mobile devices as well, such as my Android phone. The solution I've been using here for a number of years has been just syncing everything with NextCloud. So, if I open up my file manager, I get this folder on my system called NC for NextCloud, and this particular folder is shared across my home computer, as well as this computer here at my office, and of course I have the NextCloud app on my phone as well, and I have my own NextCloud web server that basically works as a middle man to sync between all these devices. And NextCloud is pretty easy to set up, although, you know, for someone who's not computer literate, like, you know, maybe your parents or your grandparents or somebody like that, you know, they may not be able to spin up their own NextCloud server to be able to sync across all their devices. So, I came across this piece of software, I've known about it for a number of years now, but I've never really used it personally, but everybody tells me that it's dead simple to use. It's called Sync Thing. So, what I've done is I installed Sync Thing already on my home computer. I've also installed it on my Samsung Galaxy Android phone, and now I'm going to install Sync Thing on this computer here at my office, this workstation at my office, and I'm going to try to sync everything between those three devices. So, the first thing I want to do, of course, is I want to install Sync Thing on this computer because I haven't installed it yet. So, I am on Arco Linux, which is an Arch Linux-based distribution. So, I'm going to do a sudo pacman dash capital S and Sync Thing. Give it my sudo password, Sync Thing. It's a very small download, no dependencies. So, that's a very quick installation. And then, if I just run Sync Thing right here from the terminal, it's going to launch in a web browser. My web browser is on a different workspace, so let me switch back to this workspace. And you can see it opens this local web page 127.0.0.1. That's on your local host, right? And then on port 83.84 is where Sync Thing will launch. And the very first time this pops up, it's going to ask, do you want to allow anonymous usage reporting? I'm going to decline that. You're also going to get a warning about setting up authentication as far as, do you want to set a user and password? Now, what this is, is you saw that I was able to just open a terminal, or if I had to run Launcher like Demon, you or Rofi, or maybe I had Sync Thing in a proper menu system on something like GNOME or KDE. If I just launch Sync Thing, it's going to take me to this page, and whatever folders are being shared across my devices anybody has access to. Now, you may not want it to be that easy to get into. So if you want to, you can set up a user and password for Sync Thing. So you have to log in to get to this point. And if you're sharing sensitive information, you probably want to do that. And you especially want to do that if your devices, maybe your home computer or your laptop, you didn't password protect being able to log in. Maybe you're one of those people that don't require a password to log into your computer. I strongly suggest you don't do that. But if you're one of those people that anybody can sit down at your computer and just start using it, then you probably want to password protect Sync Thing, especially again, if you're storing sensitive information, like, I don't know, tax documents and things like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm not going to set up a user and pass on my computer because everyone has to log in to be able to get into my computer anyway. And even if you had the password to my computer, good luck finding the key binding to launch D menu to then launch Sync Thing. You'd have to figure out what Sync Thing even installed on my system. So I'll decline it for purposes of this video. But the way this works is you have a default folder that gets created. If I launch my file manager again in my home directory, it creates this folder here, Sync with a capital S. This is the default shared folder that is created. For me, I'm not going to use that folder, but it's there. If I wanted to use it, what I could do is I could add another folder. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to link to a folder I'm already sharing with Sync Thing on my home computer as well as my Android phone. So if I click this link here for identification, if I click that, we have this string of numbers here, the string of letters and numbers. That is the identification for this computer. And then we get the QR code that I could scan, especially on a mobile device. I could just scan that QR code. If Sync Thing is on this device, which it is, and it will sync. But if you're on a device that doesn't have a camera, like a mobile device, you can't scan that QR code. You can actually share this string of numbers. You can see there's links to share by email or share by SMS. So I guess you could send a text message to yourself with that string. If for some reason maybe your camera is broken on your mobile device or whatever. But anyway, you either need the string or the QR code to sync these devices. And let me show you how this would work. If I open on my mobile phone here, let me go ahead and launch Sync Thing. And on the mobile app, you guys won't see it, but in the top right hand corner, there's a plus sign for adding devices. And then all I need to do is with the camera scan this QR code. And as soon as it picks up that QR code, you know, I am now able to share between these devices. And you can see I just got a message on this computer because just scanning the QR code or having that string of letters and numbers doesn't automatically sync you to a device because for security reasons, right? You need two-way authentication. So I've authenticated on this machine, on this mobile device. And then I also need to accept adding this device the other direction as well. So I'm going to add device and the device name is SM, whatever. So that's my Android phone, right? I'll just use the name that it suggested there. And you can see now I have remote devices listed here. Now if I click on that, you know, I could get the identification for that device as well. And then all I need to do is start creating some folders that I can share between the two. So I already have a folder I'm sharing between my phone and my home computer. All I need to do on the mobile app is just click a slider to also share that same folder with the machine titled Arco Linux. And you can see this machine here is titled Arco Linux. But let me turn that slider on. And now you can see I get a pop-up and do I want to share the folder called org. So that's my org documents because I'm on Emacs on this computer as well as my home computer. And I want the same folder of org documents because that's mostly what I write things in is in org mode. And I can have org mode on my phone as well. There's even org related programs for mobile. So yeah, let's add that. The folder is called org. I've already labeled it on the other devices. I'm just going to keep the folder name as or the folder path will be home slash org. So let's click save there. And you can see it's syncing that folder. So, so let me go ahead and open my file manager again. And now in my home directory, I have this folder created org. And there are all the org documents that are now synced from this phone to this computer, to my home computer amongst the three of them. How cool is that? You know, we didn't have to set up any kind of web server, right? There's nothing, there's nothing complicated. I mean, I guess it's kind of complicated because you do have to have sync thing installed on all the devices. And you do have to confirm on all the devices. Yeah, I want to share between this device and that device and between that device and that, you know, because you, it's not going to automatically share from one machine to another without both people on each end of those machines clicking. Okay. But other than that, you know, this is dead simple. This is much more simple than setting up a next cloud server, but setting up a next cloud web server is not hard. But again, a lot of people don't know anything about setting up web hosting or anything. So for me, you know, I'm going to play with this for a while. You know, I've been happy with my next cloud server. I may keep my next cloud server up and running, but I'm going to experiment on some of the things I'm syncing with next cloud. I'm going to move over to simply syncing them with sync thing for a while, just to see how it compares, how stable it is. Do I ever experience any headaches, any kind of breakage or anything? So that is syncing. For those of you that also want to play around with sync thing, there is a great ArchWiki page on sync thing. One thing you want to do is you definitely want to make sure that sync thing starts on startup. So there is a system D service for sync thing. If I scroll down here under this section here, 2.2 auto starting sync thing, it gives you the system D startup service. It needs to be called sync thing at your username dot service. So I haven't done this already on this computer. So let's go ahead and do this. So what I need to do, let me clear the screen and we need to do this with sudo privileges. Let's sudo system CTL enable sync thing at DT because DT is the user here on my system dash dash now. So go ahead and enable it and dash dash now go ahead and start the service. If it's not already running. Now in my case, the service is already running, but now every time I start my computer, right? Every time system D initializes sync thing will automatically run and then the sync between this computer and whatever other devices are also running sync thing should automatically happen. So that is sync thing. I'm very excited about this. I'm kind of stoked. So I'll keep you guys informed. If I run into any issues with sync thing or if I find any new and exciting things that may be, you know, some interesting features that I haven't explored yet with sync thing, you know, we may do some future videos as well. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Matt Paul, Steve West, Arkotic, Armoredragon, Commander, Angry, Darloff, George Lee, Matthew, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Pete Sarchin, Fedora, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Solastry, TNR, and ToolsDevour, Warden, Tuna, Boondoo, and Willie, these guys. They're my pastier patrons over on Patreon without these guys, this quick look at sync thing would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. If you guys want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like sync thing, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.