I just read an article sharing alternatives to Dropbox and mentioning also Syncthing. Syncthing basically is an open source continuous file synchronization software. There’s one thing mentioned that I want to shortly elaborate on:

… there is no server in between and this option is great for sharing and exchanging files, but not really suited for the heavy-weight job of storing stuff on a server. It also only synchs when machines are actually online, so it does have its limitations, but to share files between a team it does a good job.

So this assumes you are not having a server inbetween. But you can easily install syncthing on any machine, including any server. And that’s what we actually do on our Colloq servers to synchronize files across multiple machines.

Now, if you install syncthing on the server as a startup service that runs in the background you will not need to rely on other machines to be online anymore. It then works exactly like Dropbox but with the cool feature of not storing it on some foreign Cloud service where you can’t control it on your own.

Another nice thing is that syncthing can sync between machines directly in the network. I have synced nearly a Terabyte of data through Dropbox in the past between two computers in the same room. It took more than a week to complete. A year ago I did the same again but this time via syncthing using the local network. The action was done within about 4 hours.

So all I want to say here is, syncthing can be used as server synchronization software, it can be used as data upload storage, it can be used as peer-to-peer synchronization—it only depends on how you want to use it.