DingusCorp Labs
"thats some sick beat"
Self explanatory.
a small, configurable node server that runs on a rpi or similar sbc and turns it into a parking station for flash drives.
So SyncTool is the software side of a little battery powered parking station project I've been working on (it still isn't finished lol) that allows you to just drop a flash drive/usb key in, and it handles backing it up to all number of locations.
In particular, it can be configured to:
Rsync the entire drive to a NAS
Use rclone to back up the drive to your service of choice
Run a Copyparty server targeting the drive whilst it's plugged in so that you can access the files on it from anywhere
Scan a certain folder for specific subfolders, then upload new content in those subfolders to configured Open Notebook... notebooks.
I'll go into more detail on this in the hardware writup and later revisions of this article as I'm still not finished with either the software OR the hardware, but the current plan is to use a RPI Zero W or Zero 2 W... Great, cheap, tiny linux boards with plenty of GPIO. Right?
Well.. Just one problem. If we want to run this on a battery, potentially a cheap battery salvaged from some vape or UBS battery pack, then we probably want to try to do something called "Race To Sleep". The idea is that you get your work done ASAP and then as SOON as you're done you go back to sleep. This is what most smart watches use.
And that would work fine on any other machine, but the Raspberry Pi, and I mean EVERY Raspberry Pi, lacks a true equivalent to S0ix or S3 sleep. We can only HALT the system, which then blocks us from waking up again. So the idea on the Pi side of things is to wire up a cheap and dirty interval timer to GPIO 3- Wake up/Reset. When the Pi is in Halt, pulling this pin down will cause the Pi to wake up, and reboot Linux.
It's not ideal: S3 would likely use less energy as it doesn't have to tear down the OS and rebuild it every time, And I don't really want to deal with bare metal programming for the Pi. SO SyncTool wakes up, checks for a flash drive with the configured partition uid, and if it finds it, it stays on forever. If it doesn't see it, It'll wait a bit of time (Default planned to be 15 mins) and then Halt itself until 2 hours or so later when the interval timer restarts the Pi
It's jank but it'll work.
Syncthing is designed for keeping data up-to-date from device to device, not for something like this where the synced storage is removable and will likely come back later modified.
You would also still need to combine it with RClone to make it sync to Google Drive properly.
Syncthing is a great solution and it's probably better for 90% of people's usecases but for this project it just wasn't it.
In the same way this server/sync tool doesn't work well outside of this specific application so it's a bit of a pick your poison situation