barbequeer

I am a long time dropbox free user, and I find it very useful, but I have more than three devices.

I don't want to shell out for a pro account because 120 a year just seems too much to pay for syncing things between devices, and I'm a tightwad on a budget.

I've tried various combinations of syncthing, github, owncloud, nextcloud etc, on private servers and raspberry pis in my home. I work from home and dont really care about having access to stuff away from home - its really more about syncing between various family laptops and across different OSes. I'm not talking enormous amounts of data - I have 15GB storage on dropbox from when they did various promotions years ago, and I have not hit the limit yet. I mainly just sync around important docs, scripts, config files, source code for things, handy files, the odd photo or thing I want to move from one to another.

has anyone found a good free alternative that actually works well? Was it one of the above ones I mentioned? if so, what were the teething problems?

am I missing a really obvious alternative?

Ever since I became a father a few years ago I have taken a lot of photos, and because local storage is cheap I tend to keep everything. I'm now in a situation where I have ~5GB of photos and videos of my kids per year going back a few years. I got into a habit of just backing up every single photo on the phone every few months, and removing the duplicates.

I'm finding managing and backing stuff up to be a bigger time sink. Managing and finding photos is tricky with such a large collection.

Is anyone else out there in the same boat? What solutions have you come up with?