I stopped using Nextcloud when the iOS app lost data.
For some reason the app disconnected from my account in the background from time to time (annoying but didn't think it was critical). Once I pasted data on Nextcloud through the Files app integration, it didn't sync because it was disconnected and didn't say anything, and it lost the data.
I never had data outright vanish, but similar to the comment you replied to, it was just unreliable. I found Syncthing much more useful over the long haul. The last 3 times I've had to do anything with it were simply to manage having new machines replace old ones.
Syncthing sadly doesn't let you not download some folders or files, but I just moved those to other storage. It beats the Nextcloud headache.
I might be misunderstanding what you mean, but maybe the .stignore[1] file is what you're looking for? Apologies if it isn't :-)
[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
Oh no worries, yeah that works like gitignore, I’m talking more like how Nextcloud and Dropbox let you like, have a list of folders and checkboxes where you can be like “this machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” kinda thing. Which to my knowledge syncthing doesn’t have.
Don't apologize tho! I appreciate the help!
“This machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” is .stignore. It’s a bit confusing because .stignore is more like .git/info/excludes than .gitignore in that it’s not synced between machines[1]. (If you wanted a synced ignores file then you need to #include that file from each machine’s .stignore manually.) And what’s ignored on one machine doesn’t then need to be ignored on the others, which will still sync it between themselves in that case. So no pretty checkboxes, but echo /Photos >>.stignore on the machine in question and you should be good (including to delete the Photos subdirectory on that machine).
[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
Oh! Holy shit, that's SO useful. Thank you for taking the time to explain!
You can achieve this by having multiple sync folders instead of one folder with everything. Then you can configure exactly what you sync where.
Oof, sounds painful. It's hard to use anything when you can't trust its fundamentals.