Tomato's Cool Software Recommendations - Syncthing

Nowadays, it's quite common for us to use several devices in our daily life. Personally, I use 3 devices: a desktop computer, a smartphone and a laptop.

Generally, this leads to a need to access and edit some files we use on more than one device, which can be quite cumbersome if done manually. In my case, I want to have access to my music library, the photos I take with my phone and some other files in any device I use on a daily basis.

So, how do we solve this? You could do it the "manual" way, transferring the files with a Pendrive or connecting devices with a cable, but you'll need to do this a lot of times (depending on the number of devices). You could also sync the files with a cloud service like Google Drive, but this will be slower since you're uploading the files to a server and then downloading from it again (besides,this services have limited storage capacity, so they are not such a pleasant option).

That's where Syncthing comes in. Syncthing allows your files to be synced between devices using your internet connection, so, whenever two devices are in the same network, the files will sync between them, and since it works locally, there are no storage limits.

Syncthing is free and open source software and is available on almost any OS currently in use (Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, Android)

It's really easy to set up (just install it, add the devices you want and the folders you want to share). If you are using it on PC you might want see this guide to make it autostart when the computer turns on.

It really helped me to manage files between devices without having to do a lot of hard work or setting a server by myself, so give it a try if you want to see if it fits your needs ;)