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Comment on I am attempting to get into self hosting after a shockingly frightening experience. I am very lost though.

MTZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Do you know anywhere that I could find a guide on how to set that up correctly? I’ve used SyncThing in the past and it ended up being not good because of my own ignorance. I have syncthing on my phone and my desktop, but neither of them are syncing anything to anywhere. I’m terrified that I will mess something up and possibly lose data, or end up with a gigantic mess of files that do not belong in the synced directory, that’s what happened the only time I ever did use Syncthing. For some reason, it basically transferred a gigantic directory of things that were not relevant at all from my PC to my phone, filling up all of the storage and it was a hassle to get rid of everything that was not supposed to be there. I REALLY want the KeePass databases on my phone and on my PC to communicate and update each other though. Entering everything in twice has been frustrating.

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Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I haven’t used a guide aside from the official getting started with syncthing page.

It should be similar to these steps though, I’ll use your desktop as the origin device.

install syncthing on all devices you want to be syncing with

on your desktop syncthing page, click “add remote device” and add the device ID of your phone(found on your phones syncthing app), you can also add any other device you want to have communications with

make a backup of your current keepass file just in case these steps shouldn’t cause files to change but, since the end goal is syncing two devices that you have mentioned have differences with files with the same name better safe than sorry

create a keepass share on one of the devices (the folder path of this file should be wherever your keepass file is stored on your device. If this file is in a folder with a bunch of other files, you may want to move the file to it’s own subfolder or you will end up sharing all of the files in that path)

under file versioning chose what type of file version control you want. I prefer staggered since it when a remote device changes the file it moves the old file to a folder, and then deletes them according to the settings

at this point you should double check the name of your mobile devices keepass file name, if its the same as the name of the db on the desktop, you should rename it prior to continuing. Keepass should be able to detect a file conflict and rename it on it’s own but, better safe than sorry.

share the folder with the device you want to sync it(your phone in this case)

Your phone should get a notification that a device wants to share something with it. Approve it, be careful not to clear it because it’s a pain in the butt to get that notification back if you accidentally deny or swipe it away, the mobile app isn’t /amazing/ with it’s UI (but it has gotten better)

once approved configure it to where you wanted the file to be on your mobile device.

You should be done at this point. Syncthing should be automatically syncing the keepass files between the two

Some things you may want to keep into consideration. Syncthing only operates when there are two devices or more that are online. I would recommend if you are getting into self hosting a server, having the server be the middle man. If you end up going that route these steps stay more or less the same, it’s just instead of sharing with the phone, its sharing with the server, and then moving to the server syncthing page and sharing with the mobile. This makes it so both devices use the server instead of trying to connect to each other. Additionally, if you do go that route, I recommend setting your remote devices on the server’s syncthing instance to “auto approve” this makes it so when you share a folder to the server from one of your devices, it automatically approves and makes a share using the name of the folder shared in the syncthing’s data directory. (ex. if your folder was named documents and you shared it to the server, it would create a share named “documents” in where-ever you have it configured to store data). You would still need to login to the server instance in the case of sharing said files to /another/ device, but if your intent was to only create a backup of a folder to the server, then it removes a step.

Another benefit that using the server middleman approach is that if you ever have to change a device later on down the road, you are only having to add 1 remote device to the server instance, instead of having to add your new device onto every syncthing that needs access to that device.

Additionally, if you already have the built in structure but it isn’t seeming like it is working, some standard troubleshooting steps I’ve found helpful:

if trying to share between devices, make sure that there is at least two devices that are connected as remote devices active in order to sync

If above is true, make sure the folder ID’s are the same between both devices. that is how syncthing detects folders that should be sync’d

If also true, make sure the devices are being seen as online in remote devices. If it isn’t showing as online, the connection is being blocked somewhere, verify you don’t have a firewall or router blocking it somewhere.
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- MTZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  That is so awesome. Thank you so very much for taking the time out to inform me on this matter.
  
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