Syncthing File Explorer/Finder Integration with on-demand files

Problem/Justification
TrueNAS is a great server solution except for one huge missing feature equivalent: native sync clients for users. Synology has “Synology Drive” and QNap has their own equivalent as well now. This allows users to either use traditional SMB/NFS or also a web client like OneDrive/Dropbox.

As more people work from home, and pull files over WAN, SMB is no longer performant nor in the case of MacOS even usable over a flakey mobile connection like LTE where they might be going in and out of reception but still need offline file access.

TrueNAS supports NextCloud but that’s a whole thing and isn’t compatible with SMB shares datasets. Businesses need to offer offline sync access over WAN and also access locally to LAN clients. I can’t recommend TrueNAS to many businesses because of the value of Synology Drive.

Synology and QNap both rolled out closed source server/client systems. But TrueNAS could deliver this I think “easily” (ha) via Syncthing as the database/sync engine. It would require writing a client application for MacOS and Windows that uses Syncthing on TrueNAS and then an application to use the native CloudSync/StubFile systems built into Windows and Mac e.g.

  • Cloud Sync Engines - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn
  • File Provider | Apple Developer Documentation

Impact

Huge impact for business users who are used to Dropbox or OneDrive/Sharepoint. This would let them sync at line-speed across a WAN optimized protocol and the memory footprint would stay low if you’re already using SyncThing between multiple servers for continuous backup.

User Story

Jane is an IT manager for a medium sized business and she’s looking for a storage solution. Many workers are local and connect over LAN and SMB shares but some are remote and rely on a sync client. She already trusts Syncthing as a recommended enterprise application from TrueNAS to sync between the working server and a continuous backup pool but configuring syncthing on basic computer users is too complicated and is designed to sync full datasets, not files on-demand.

With a SyncThing client that integrates with the TrueNAS hosted database datasets a user is able to install a simple application, receive a share QR Code and then see the folders shared with them in their file explorer. All folders and files are immediately visible but only Sync’ed on-demand as the user attempts to open them. When they’re done they can use the native OS tools to release the files to be online-only.

This is a workflow they’re familiar with from using Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud.