syncthing-backup

This small program uses Syncthing's REST API to backup files incrementally each time local SyncThing has finished syncing a folder. (No worries: the API is queried on the machine on which you run syncthing-activity.)

Requirements

Get api key

Open Syncthing's Web UI at http://127.0.0.1:8384, click on Actions and Settings. On the Settings panel, General tab you'll find the API key on the right. Copy that into an environment variable before launching syncthing-activity.py:

export SYNCTHING_APIKEY="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
./syncthing-activity.py

If your Syncthing is listening on a special URL, you can additionally override the default URL:

export SYNCTHING_URL="http://localhost:8384"

usage

./syncthing-activity Run this command to simply monitor all folders and copy new files to the backup location. Additionally files will be moved to the folder/archive subfolder (so that the user knows those files have been backed up and can delete them safely).

./syncthing-activity photos Run this command to monitor all Syncthing folders with "photos" in their name and copy new files to the backup location. Additionally files will be moved to the folder/archive subfolder (so that the client device can still use those files, but the user can easily empty the /archive folder if needed).

example

The family runs Syncthing-fork on their Android phones. The folders /Pictures are being synced to a home NAS/PC. On that PC, I run this script to continuously monitor completed sync actions of folders with "Pictures" in their name. For example "Tom's Pictures" will be monitored but "Tom's AppBackups" will not.

To-Do (have to figure this part out yet, with rsync and mv commands): When new photos are created in the phone /Picture folder, Syncthing will sync those to the PC. Then syncthing-backup.py will copy new/modified files to a backup location (not synced by Syncthing). Lastly, it moves these files to the /Picture/archive folder, and syncs those changes back to the phone.

Tom, will now still be able to use/see his pictures, but whenever he runs out of storage, he can delete items in /Pictures/archive (or delete ../archives folder).

Done: For debugging, logfile is created each time a folder with a specific name has completed syncing.