Kopia + "realtime" synchronization (nexcloud?)

Here is my use-case: I have 2 computers, one I want to keep at home, one at my work. I’d like them to share content live, so I was thinking to use nextcloud (maybe self hosted unless I can do what I want with my work instance?) to synchronize them in realtime. But I also want to do proper backups & snapshots of basically the same data, that I’m thinking to keep also a copy on the same server. My goal here is to minimize the space required to store this, to avoid having the data stored 2 times (one for kopia, one for nextcloud).

How do people solve this kind of issue?

  • is it possible to use only kopia (using nexcloud only as a kopia’s repository) in “realtime” mode? Is it recommended/efficient to take snapshots every 2mn for instance? Can kopia deal with conflicts (like git merge) if I do offline changes on both computers like nexcloud is doing?
  • if not, can I configure kopia & nextcloud to work collaboratively, by sharing the data? I know that nexcloud can also use S3 to store data (so one could use the same bucket for both nextcloud and kopia), but I’m afraid that since kopia cuts files in chunks, this won’t work.

Kopia is a backup software not bi-sync one.

Use right tools for the job.

For syncing multiple computers I would recommendsyncthing and if your want to involve cloud storage try rclone bisync.

What you described is not really achievable easily with free tools and probably would require custom tools. So in real life you will have to compromise a bit between what you want and what is achievable.

Thanks for your answer.

Too bad, it seems that it could be quite “easily” made into a bi-sync tool with snapshots. For instance, it seems like one could maintain on the server one repository with a single path, and all clients could add in a pre-action (before any snapshot) a rsync command syncing the locally mounted server’s repo back to the user’s repository. This, might not be super efficient, by I guess one could derive a variant of kopia restore doing this more efficiently…

The problem is that I can only find a single tool that provides both bisync & snapshots: git annex, and it has other issues that make it impractical (for instance, you need to lock files to avoid having to store twice the amount of data on your computer, which is quite annoying in practice). So by asking this question I was hoping that kopia could be such a tool.

Thanks. I use syncthing, but it does not provide snapshots. Maybe syncthing + ZFS snapshots is the solution then, but ZFS is not as versatile as kopia, for instance it is harder to use it with S3 or server that don’t run ZFS… I think what I want is kopia as a file system :stuck_out_tongue:

Ok too bad then, thanks anyway.