Syncthing replaced Dropbox on every device I own, and the…

Replacing Dropbox with Syncthing, for most users, will feel like a drop-in replacement as long as you know exactly what you’re looking for in a tool.

Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces. He writes for XDA-Developers, where he focuses on topics like productivity, networking, self-hosting, and more. Over the years, his work has also appeared in leading publications such as Android Police, Android Authority, CNET, PCMag, and more.

Outside of his professional work, Dhruv is an avid fan of horror media spanning films and literature, enjoys fitness activities, collects vinyl records, and plays the guitar. Keeping files synced across every device I own is a consistent problem. It's never straightforward, especially if you are on any and every platform like me. Between Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and even my NAS, making sure that my files are everywhere I need them to be is anything but easy.

For years, Dropbox handled that job. It worked fairly reliably and kept essentials like my writing folder, screenshots, and project files aligned across devices. But over time, I became aware that I was trading my privacy for that convenience. My files were on third-party infrastructure. Dropbox's storage limits kept nudging me toward paid tiers. And more importantly, I had very little control over how it worked.

I did not want cloud storage, I just needed a reliable synchronization tool between my own devices. That's why I installed Syncthing. Turns out, this was precisely what I needed. Within minutes, it replaced Dropbox for me. Here's the thing. Dropbox solves a very specific problem. You put files in a Dropbox folder and they appear everywhere. Straightforward and simple. Except Dropbox isn't a sync tool at all.

It's a cloud storage locker. That's where gaps in the system start showing up. For example, storage caps are a very real issue. Elsewhere, upload speeds matter too. When dealing with oversized video files, especially LOG video files and RAW images, sync slows down to a crawl. And selective sync isn't quite the solution either. Plus, there's the obvious reality of working with a third-party tool. Your data moves from a device to a cloud server and then syncs down to another storage endpoint.

That's a full round trip through third-party infrastructure, and when dealing with my personal photos, I don't necessarily want that. And it's not just photos. When I'm working with privileged documents, or contracts, that's an additional layer of liability. When using Syncthing, it's only on my devices and nowhere else. That's a massive difference. Syncthing isn't cloud storage at all; it's much more straightforward device to device synchronization.

There's no central server hosting your data. Instead, each device runs a small service that talks directly to each other. So, when you add a file or folder to Syncthing, files move directly between approved machines and are encrypted in transit without being stored on an external platform. That's a much more straightforward process, and all I have to do is install Syncthing on my desktop, laptop, and home server.

Each device generates a unique ID. Once you've approved the connections between them, synchronization begins. You could quite literally be working on a draft on your laptop, and it'll pop up on your phone. When working with screenshots, I use it the other way around to send screenshots over to my laptop. Just drop the files into a project directory, and they immediately show up on my server moments later.

No further manual steps are needed. For my own use case, Syncthing offers a bunch of advantages. With Dropbox, storage expansion means paying more. That's not an issue with Syncthing. Storage expansion means adding an extra drive on top of the terabytes of storage on my own server. Effectively, the ceiling on file sizes that I can transfer is determined by my own hardware, not by how much I'm paying for a third-party service.

There are additional advantages to using Syncthing that serve my use case better. For example, it handles file versioning if you've enabled it, which means older copies of files can be retained in case of accidental edits or deletions. It even manages file conflicts intelligently. Elsewhere, only block-level changes are transferred instead of re-uploading everything from scratch. These features make a big difference in everyday usability.

While we're at it, there are certain things to be aware of. For example, Syncthing will not give you public share links. So if that's something you rely on , that's a no-go. Nor does it give you a great looking web dashboard for your files. But that's not a negative, really. It's just not meant for that use. If you rely heavily on sharing links with clients or collaborating through shared cloud folders, you may still want a traditional cloud provider.

Like I mentioned, different tools for different jobs. Finally, there's one huge benefit to using Syncthing — it works over local networks. So, if most of your file syncing happens within your office or home, you'll never even touch the internet. Large file transfers essentially happen at local network speeds instead of being throttled by upload bandwidth. Replacing Dropbox with Syncthing, for most users, will feel like a drop-in replacement as long as you know exactly what you're looking for in a tool.

For my specific use case, I just needed data replication between two points, and with Syncthing set up, that's exactly what I got. My files continue to show up exactly where they should. Edits propagate in near real time and folders remain consistent across destinations. And to set all of this up took me a mere ten minutes. Well, maybe another couple of minutes here and there fiddling with settings, but you catch my drift.

Dropbox serves a purpose, but Syncthing proved to be a better tool for me and today, practically every device I own runs it. Syncthing is an open-source peer-to-peer file synchronization tool that directly synchronizes files and folders between two devices without depending on cloud servers.

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