Home backup and sync

TL;DR

• Syncthing is a brilliant tool that works across any desktop on your network. Your data does not leave the network. Perfect for immediate backup/sync of current data. I keep a small Linux box always-on to always have redundancy.

• NextCloud for cloud-based sync, including with mobile devices and servers outside your network. The iOS app NextCloud Notes is bare-bones, works well enough, and handles network interruptions and airplane mode. The server is self-hostable, but there are also cheap commercial offerings for hosting.

• Keep taking periodic local backups to disk! Sure, use cloud-backup tools if you like as an addition, but not a substitution.

Motivation and caveats

For a long time I’ve been looking for a good solution to my backup and syncing. Like many people, I need:

• Backups of my full data, taken regularly
• Syncing data across several desktop machines. Not for everything necessarily.
• Syncing with mobile devices. Again, not everything, just useful info to have on the move. Shopping lists, essays in development, etc.
• A way to sync info with my work computer, or computers outside my home network, that is better than sending myself emails.

I’ve tried many tools over the years. They sync game is frustrating, because the default is to push you into walled gardens and to keep your data on the provider’s machines. Being a user of iPhone, I’ve tried several tools based on iCloud, but I’m bothered that it doesn’t play so well on Linux and Windows, both of which I use.
I’ve tried other solutions like DropBox or pCloud, but I just a) don’t trust commercial offerings to stay upright, and b) prefer open source and self-hostable solutions for something this critical.

I’ve wondered if relying on the cloud completely makes sense. I’ve always had the impression it doesn’t.

Then you see stories like these¹:

On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation.

I learned about it from a Mastodon post²: which contained a good proposal for data safety:

This is why you need to keep all your data offline. The 3-2-1 backup rule is a good data protection strategy that states that you keep 3 copies of your data, storing them on 2 different types of storage media, and keeping 1 copy offsite under your bed or office. Don’t trust your hosting company’s backup service.