freefilesync vs resilio sync vs syncthing

Once it’s done writing and checking, insert the SD card into the RPi, make sure all your peripherals (including the hard drive you’re planning on networking!) are plugged in, powered up and ready to go, and boot up that Pi! Of course, you can choose a different OS if you’re doing something more custom (headless Ubuntu, for example)

A steady internet connection with a wireless router (or a lot of ethernet cables).

However, if you have a solely Mac or Linux ecosystem, you will need to do additional research.

This article assumes you are interacting with Windows computers that are set up in a network (workgroup) my wife’s Mac laptop is able to interact with that workgroup, as is my Android phone.

I used a Vantec IDE/SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter and it worked a treat.

Keep in mind that Raspberry Pis don’t have a lot of extra electricity to power external drives, so you may need an external power source. Because I was using parts that I had around for this project, I used a 3TB Western Digital “red” NAS drive, which works just fine. I highly recommend an SSD drive, rather than an HDD drive, because of speed and reliability, both of which are very important in this application (although you could use a simple USB stick, nowadays there’s some with really big capacity).

A computer with an SD card slot and a MicroSD to SD adapter OR a computer with a MicroSD slot.To be able to interact with the Raspberry Pi: A screen with HDMI input, a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable, USB keyboard and mouse OR the ability to SSH into the Raspberry Pi.In my project I ended up with a 32GB Samsung MicroSDXC EVO. I recommend using 8GB at least, just to be safe.

A MicroSD card with at least 4GB there are methods for booting a Raspberry Pi off of a 2GB card that are beyond the scope of this article.

Don’t skimp on this RPis don’t use a lot of power, but they need it steady, and you shouldn’t try to just run it on any old Android phone power supply.

The appropriate power supply, either for an RPi Zero-3 or an RPi 4.

A Raspberry Pi of your choosing (I would recommend at least a 3 or a 4 for this project, although if you’re not serving/syncing much, you might be able to get away with less) for this project, I used a Raspberry Pi 3 B+.

Freefilesync vs resilio sync vs syncthing