Sync In : Your data belongs to you
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@timconsidine the UI suggests there is a chat function just underneath the notifications bell on the right, but it doesn't look functional.
MacOS Client looks exactly like the web interface, so what's the benefit?
@robi good questions
The right panel changes a little depending on what main panel is displayed.
The 'chat' type icon is more of a comments function, allowing users to add a comment to a file for their own reference later, or to alert co-workers to some info.
It might not seem functional because a file needs to be selected in the central pane, as a comment is related to a specific file.
About the client, yes, it's very similar to the web UI. I think this is good, but can raise the question you did.
The specific features of the client over the web UI (apart from just a personal preference of a local client vs a web window amongst 50 other open web windows) are :- synchronisation : the local client allows you to set a link (one-way or bi-directional) between a folder on the local computer and the app's server-side storage
- the local client allows you to have multiple Sync-in sites live and quickly switch between them (business vs personal ?)
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@robi good questions
The right panel changes a little depending on what main panel is displayed.
The 'chat' type icon is more of a comments function, allowing users to add a comment to a file for their own reference later, or to alert co-workers to some info.
It might not seem functional because a file needs to be selected in the central pane, as a comment is related to a specific file.
About the client, yes, it's very similar to the web UI. I think this is good, but can raise the question you did.
The specific features of the client over the web UI (apart from just a personal preference of a local client vs a web window amongst 50 other open web windows) are :- synchronisation : the local client allows you to set a link (one-way or bi-directional) between a folder on the local computer and the app's server-side storage
- the local client allows you to have multiple Sync-in sites live and quickly switch between them (business vs personal ?)
@timconsidine thanks for the screen shots, however I didn't see you open the chat icon as mentioned.
I happened to create a second user in addition to the admin and could see each in that side window. There were no actions possible from it.
Also I noticed that the client hijacked my command button away from the Brave browser I am typing this on. I use it command-<- to navigate back in the forum, and strangely it only navigated back in the sync-in client, even though it didn't have window focus! Insane.
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Yes, I am agreeing there is no chat.
I'm not meeting that command button issue, but maybe I don't have the same setup.
@timconsidine that button seems to be a list of tasks, instead of a chat.
Relaunching the app still steals my command button, so off it goes ;-/
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Hi @timconsidine - in passing, just wanted to thank you for your tenacity and willingness to get this packaged.
much appreciated.@Neiluj @timconsidine
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@timconsidine that button seems to be a list of tasks, instead of a chat.
Relaunching the app still steals my command button, so off it goes ;-/
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Whoop, whoop, whoop
Breakthrough !After spending X hours on packaging the release, Y hours on building from source and Z hours on alternative implementations of building from source,
- where X is too long,
- where Y is X * 2, and
- where Z is Y * 3,
... I gave up and changed approach again, and now have Sync-in packaged and installing and running on my Cloudron !
TBH, there is still a bunch of work to do, but having cracked baseline minimal function deployment, I'm hopeful (well, praying) that I can get the rest of it done.
WORKING :
- builds, installs and runs
- login and basic file storage operations working
TO-DO / TO-TEST :
- desktop client downloading and synchronisation (now
) - OnlyOffice integration
- file storage "in app" and by volume mount
- backups
- WebDAV (now )
- automated install by CCAI (Custom App Installer)
I will of course make a repo on git.cloudron.io, but want to do so when I have ironed out some things (had to be a bit naughty to get to here) and completed more of the o/s work.
I don't use Windows so will need some help testing desktop sync on that platform; when the time comes, volunteers appreciated.
(grinning like a Cheshire one)@timconsidine said in Sync In : Your data belongs to you:
Whoop, whoop, whoop
Breakthrough !After spending X hours on packaging the release, Y hours on building from source and Z hours on alternative implementations of building from source,
- where X is too long,
- where Y is X * 2, and
- where Z is Y * 3,
... I gave up and changed approach again, and now have Sync-in packaged and installing and running on my Cloudron !
TBH, there is still a bunch of work to do, but having cracked baseline minimal function deployment, I'm hopeful (well, praying) that I can get the rest of it done.
WORKING :
- builds, installs and runs
- login and basic file storage operations working
TO-DO / TO-TEST :
- desktop client downloading and synchronisation (now)
- OnlyOffice integration
- file storage "in app" and by volume mount
- backups
- WebDAV (now )
- automated install by CCAI (Custom App Installer)
I will of course make a repo on git.cloudron.io, but want to do so when I have ironed out some things (had to be a bit naughty to get to here) and completed more of the o/s work.
I don't use Windows so will need some help testing desktop sync on that platform; when the time comes, volunteers appreciated.
(grinning like a Cheshire one)Awesome! I just discovered Sync-in this morning and my first thought was "does it exist on Cloudron?". Gonna give it a try real soon, I'm really unhappy with all other drive-like softwares (google, microsoft, and the likes).
But, without Cloudron to cover backups and help me handle all the things I don't know, I'm not confident moving my company's files anywhere else, too much risk involved.
I'll start small and personal, hopefully it's a great fit! -
@timconsidine How would you recommend using Sync-in, considering the need of 1TB of data storage, I'm not sure what hosting provider to use, I usually use Hetzner, but with that much data I'm not sure how to handle "Volumes" (extra disk space on top of the main drive) and related-volume stuff (backups, etc.)
If you have some recommandation, that'd be interesting.
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Big new release of upstream Sync-in
Updating the cloudron repo to support it
Please stand by ... -
Sync-in updated to v1.10
my git repo : https://git.cloudron.io/timconsidine/cloudron-sync-in
https://ccai.appx.uk should now deploy this version
OR manually :- clone repo
- do the docker build and push to your registry
- use cloudron CLI to install
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@timconsidine How would you recommend using Sync-in, considering the need of 1TB of data storage, I'm not sure what hosting provider to use, I usually use Hetzner, but with that much data I'm not sure how to handle "Volumes" (extra disk space on top of the main drive) and related-volume stuff (backups, etc.)
If you have some recommandation, that'd be interesting.
@DNA-PC hmmm, 1Tb of files is certainly large - power user !
I am still testing Sync-in with bigger storage volumes, but haven't reached 1Tb !
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does your Cloudron have 1Tb of space for files ?
If not, external storage is needed, which is implied in your question -
if you do have space on your Cloudron instance, I would definitely use a volume to make cloudron backups easier, OR use rsync in preference to tar.gz.
I use Hetzner Storage Box as a backup destination with rsync
- Sync-in should not be any different to any other Cloudron app which needs external storage via a volume.
I haven't tested this yet, but will add it to my testing tasks.
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@DNA-PC hmmm, 1Tb of files is certainly large - power user !
I am still testing Sync-in with bigger storage volumes, but haven't reached 1Tb !
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does your Cloudron have 1Tb of space for files ?
If not, external storage is needed, which is implied in your question -
if you do have space on your Cloudron instance, I would definitely use a volume to make cloudron backups easier, OR use rsync in preference to tar.gz.
I use Hetzner Storage Box as a backup destination with rsync
- Sync-in should not be any different to any other Cloudron app which needs external storage via a volume.
I haven't tested this yet, but will add it to my testing tasks.
@timconsidine That's my wife's request, I'm merely a servant
"We need at least that much" she said.
It gets very expensive with such volumes IMHO, with costs around 50$/month, so I'm also considering having a NAS home, such as https://nas-fr.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp2800-serveur-nasBut sync-in interests me for work and for my (small) companies and non-profit, too. Can't have everything sitting at home.
I've never configured backups for Volumes, I understand you can use Hetzner Storage Box as storage and rsync as utility to perform the actual sync, interesting.
I don't currently have anything (just a server sitting there to run some tests and get familiar with all of this), my ~1TB files are currently living in OneDrive. No hurry to change.
Just to share a bit of my situation
Thanks! -
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I may need to update Sync-in for cloudron better support of a volume for files. Investigating ...
@timconsidine I tried the demo and like it, but to make it even better (not at least in comparision with Nextcloud) it should have full text search. Not sure if that is doable?
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@timconsidine I tried the demo and like it, but to make it even better (not at least in comparision with Nextcloud) it should have full text search. Not sure if that is doable?
@Kubernetes I like the UI and overall approach
We are very happy to share some great news: Sync-in has been selected by selfh.st in their list of favorite open-source applications of 2025. It is a wonderful recognition for the project, and we are truly honored.
https://sync-in.com/news/sync-in-selfhst-2025
Regarding full text search, it might be an issue of permissions on the space in the demo.
Sync-in's full-text search allows you to search deep inside the content of your documents, not just by name. Thanks to a powerful indexing engine, you can scan a wide range of files including PDF, Office documents, HTML, plain text, and more. Use specific keywords, exact phrases, or operators to include or exclude terms to narrow down your results.
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@timconsidine That's my wife's request, I'm merely a servant
"We need at least that much" she said.
It gets very expensive with such volumes IMHO, with costs around 50$/month, so I'm also considering having a NAS home, such as https://nas-fr.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp2800-serveur-nasBut sync-in interests me for work and for my (small) companies and non-profit, too. Can't have everything sitting at home.
I've never configured backups for Volumes, I understand you can use Hetzner Storage Box as storage and rsync as utility to perform the actual sync, interesting.
I don't currently have anything (just a server sitting there to run some tests and get familiar with all of this), my ~1TB files are currently living in OneDrive. No hurry to change.
Just to share a bit of my situation
Thanks! -
@timconsidine said in Sync In : Your data belongs to you:
Whoop, whoop, whoop
Breakthrough !After spending X hours on packaging the release, Y hours on building from source and Z hours on alternative implementations of building from source,
- where X is too long,
- where Y is X * 2, and
- where Z is Y * 3,
... I gave up and changed approach again, and now have Sync-in packaged and installing and running on my Cloudron !
TBH, there is still a bunch of work to do, but having cracked baseline minimal function deployment, I'm hopeful (well, praying) that I can get the rest of it done.
WORKING :
- builds, installs and runs
- login and basic file storage operations working
TO-DO / TO-TEST :
- desktop client downloading and synchronisation (now)
- OnlyOffice integration
- file storage "in app" and by volume mount
- backups
- WebDAV (now )
- automated install by CCAI (Custom App Installer)
I will of course make a repo on git.cloudron.io, but want to do so when I have ironed out some things (had to be a bit naughty to get to here) and completed more of the o/s work.
I don't use Windows so will need some help testing desktop sync on that platform; when the time comes, volunteers appreciated.
(grinning like a Cheshire one)Awesome! I just discovered Sync-in this morning and my first thought was "does it exist on Cloudron?". Gonna give it a try real soon, I'm really unhappy with all other drive-like softwares (google, microsoft, and the likes).
But, without Cloudron to cover backups and help me handle all the things I don't know, I'm not confident moving my company's files anywhere else, too much risk involved.
I'll start small and personal, hopefully it's a great fit!@DNA-PC said in Sync In : Your data belongs to you:
I just discovered Sync-in this morning
Bet that was from AlternativeTo Bluesky or X post. Same here!
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@DNA-PC said in Sync In : Your data belongs to you:
I just discovered Sync-in this morning
Bet that was from AlternativeTo Bluesky or X post. Same here!
@RoundHouse1924 or from http://selfh.st/ newsletter?
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None of those, it was from a French website https://korben.info/sync-in-alternative-francaise-nextcloud-dechire.html
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@timconsidine If you have any pointers regarding how to configure Volumes with Hetzner hosting, to store the Sync-in "drive files" in a dedicated volume instead of the main drive.
I've never used volumes, only tried it once and couldn't achieve what I wanted, I didn't understand how to backup them (you mentioned rsync, so I guess there isn't a native Cloudron-powered way to achieve that simply)
I'm really careful about backups and restoration, I must have confidence in how it's done to revert/reinstall if ever necessary.
Here is a bit of a feedback
So far so good, your install worked neatly once I upgraded Cloudron to 9.0.15, wasn't working on 7.7.2.
Hosted on Hetzner, costs me 2.99$/month for 40GB hard drive (cx23)
I also configured webdav, it was super simple on MacOS. This is what it looks like now:
Already reached my 40GB of disk size.
Some of my file uploads failed, it not always obvious why, there is no retry mechanism, and it's hard to identify the file/culprit.
- I've reached max disk size for one file (5GB left, 6GB file size)
- Google slides and other google documents failed to upload (.gslides)
The ability to sync folder-to-folder is just incredible, I've been using Sugarsync for the past 10 year just for that feature, costs me 100$/y. Having it on the mobile app was the only way I had to sync some internal apps folders to avoid content loss. The fact Sync-in doesn't have a native mobile app yet probably means I won't be able to achieve that with Sync-in yet (unless it's possible with the few apps mentioned in https://sync-in.com/docs/user-guide/mobile_apps), might be possible, though.
The ability to configure filters, per sync, is just so welcome, it's something I could never achieve with Sugarsync, typically. Made it utterly impossible to backup "dev" folders because I couldn't ignore huge subfolders like node_modules, .git, and the likes.
I was first surprised by how Sync-in uses a scheduler to run syncs, the default is 15mn. I find it way too long so I guess I'll just use 1mn on most folders, but the ability to customise it is really great. I'm used to have the files being synced as they are added, I wonder why they haven't made it that way and rely on a scheduler instead. But a 1mn delay isn't an issue at all I believe.
I was unsure how to use "Spaces" at first. Also, it's not obvious what should be inside the "Personal" folder.
As I plan on using this for my various companies (solopreneur), I first thought of using a different Space for each company, but I'm not sure to go about that way after all, as it doesn't seem possible to sync a whole folder directly as a Space. And Spaces are meant for collaboration and that's not something I need at this time. Also, the Personal folder allows to move some files into Spaces using Anchors so that offers very flexible options on the long run anyway.
let me get back to you on that - trying to get cloudron-seafile out the door, but will come back to you