I just had to email me a file I got sent to my phone and I feel unable to accept this as the better solution.
What you do guys use for inter-device communication?
Localsend
KDE Connect and SyncThing
- syncthing (file synchronization)
- kdeconnect (file transfers, clipboard sharing, presentation remote)
- deskflow (keyboard and mouse sharing)
- warpinator (one off file sharing)
- rsync / scp (one off file copies / backups)
Everyone else mentioned most of what I would suggest.
One is missing for your original problem. Localsend. Think airdrop but cross platform. Super useful if you have a mix of devices (iOS, android, windows, etc…)
Nextcloud
Syncthing for everything: file transfers, backing up phone photos, synced obsidian vaults, etc.
magic wormhole
For files I use syncthing (also for music/photos/notes/etc… syncing files is IMHO the way to go wherever applicable).
For sending links to my PC (eg. articles linked from podcasts’ notes) I used to rely on firefox sync, but I’m starting to distance myself from Mozilla so I am gonna experiment with wallabang.
For sending small notes to myself (stuff that I want to sort or act upon when I get to my PC), I’m using signal’s “note to self” but I’m investigating alternatives because signal doesn’t mark such messages as unread and so sometimes I forget I’ve sent some.
Yep. For folders where I want access quick access to everything in the folder, SyncThing is best.
Starting to dabble with KDE Connect for one-off file transfers where SyncThing is overkill
where SyncThing is overkill
I just have a dedicated shared folder between my phone and desktop and drop oneoff stuff there (it’s also easier to script this way)
feem worked good for me over WiFi, going from grapheneos to Linux mint.
I use a mix of few things
- kapus.app for starters where a device is completely new and I need to pass some secrets like login to Nextcloud to get keepass or something
- Nextcloud - documents that I rarely access. Some bigger files
- syncthing - for often access files like main keepass. Home server acts as a de-facto hub.
- quick share for an airdrop replacement
- if quick share is not working for some reason I also have a private channel on matrix where I can share some stuff quickly as-hoc
Mostly Nextcloud, for my Keepass databases that doesn’t work though. Because the android client handles files completely different than the desktop versions.
So for that I use syncthing with my home server being a hub, that everything syncs to locally, if I need updates to propagate while I’m not home I VPN in. However I rarely need to do that.
It works for me just fine with KeePass2Android, what exactly is your problem?
Idk rember exactly, on desktop Nextcloud adds a folder structure to the OSs filesystem.
On android it doesn’t do that, instead you either open a file from within Nextcloud, which confuses Keepass, and Nextcloud if you change anything. Or at least the sync database feature doesn’t work, or smth like that.
If I wasn’t careful with adding new entries I’d get a lot of conflicts that weren’t a single click to resolve.
Syncthing on Android does exactly what the nextcloud- client does on desktop. So the file is just sitting in a folder, and any changes can be ingested into wherever I have and old version of a database open, by using the synchronize with file option.
I think the problem is that Android doesn’t immediately upload the changes since Keepass (which one are you using?) doesn’t poll all the time - assuming you opened your .kdbx through “Nextcloud” option. You can always use “Synchronize database…” option of Keepass2Android that will upload or download everything. And even if you have conflicts, they are usually easily solved by merging changes. At least that’s my experience.
Maybe its because I use the variant (of Keepass2Android) with “offline” tacked onto the end?
I don’t exactly remember why I chose that one though…
Its a running system now, all the syncthing stuff isn’t exposed to the internet, so I don’t really mind the stuff going on with syncthing-fork atm…
edit: Its a running system, I won’t touch it unless I need to…
Used to use syncthing for files, now I just mount smb shares since I finally found how to do it on Android. Also kdeconnect is indispensable tool for me.
SSH or a USB stick that has USB 3 on one end and USB C on the other
I always have SSH everywhere on everything and I could never understand why anyone ever would want to make it more complicated than that.
Admittedly, I don’t do a lot of shuffling files around from this device to that, however, if I do, I mostly rely on sFTP or SSH.
Most people probably don’t care but it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices. For my main devices I don’t give them SSH access to each other, but I do give them SSH access to my secondary devices (like a Pi-Hole)
[…] it can be a security risk, allowing malware to move “laterally” between all your devices.
Unless you do something incredibly stupid, such as allowing keyless login or sharing keys (or having unencrypted keys or keys without a passphrase, seriously), I find it hard to see how that would actually happen in practice.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
My point is that SSH access is very powerful, and effectively means that the security of the SSH server is reduced to the security of the SSH client. If your SSH client is pwned, so is your server. If you have 10 devices each with ssh access to each other, then if any one device is pwned, all devices are pwned as well.
This is not the case for systems designed for file sharing only. For example with syncthing, if one device gets pwned, all it can do is send files to the other devices.
Even if you have a password for your ssh key, malware on your system can just wait until you enter the password.
Sure, it’s just that from my point-of-view I’d be toast anyway if anyone managed to gain that level of access.
Depending on the number of devices you have, your threat model, it can be helpful to set up a security hierarchy. So you only need to worry about securing the devices at the top of the hierarchy, and can play loose and careless with the devices lower down. That way it’s less likely to lose everything due to one mistake
Copyparty. Or any other web file server.
