Umbrel Files for a Road Warrior — Syncing, Syncthing, Offline, etc

Hello Umbrel Community,

I’m very impressed with Umbrel Files. I am dangerously close to fully abandoning all cloud storage providers, but I’ve discovered a few edge cases and I’m looking for a solution.

I have a laptop, a tablet and a phone. I travel a lot. Being a road warrior and having fully-remote VPN access to my umbrel is set up and I use it for Immich, for example. It’s pretty flawless.

However, with SMB connection to Umbrel I notice a few shortcomings:

  • On phone and tablet, access is read-only
  • Local/offline is impossible
  • On laptop, data is not replicated with SMB

Conceptually (and for redundancy), I prefer the idea of multiple local copies of the files: on my laptop, on my tablet, on my phone, and on my umbrel. Syncthing appears to be the ideal service for this.

Syncthing on Umbrel, however, is not intuitively easy to use; I would have thought I could map the Umbrel files directory to syncthing, install syncthing on my tablet and phone, and hey presto I’ve got exactly what I want…

But no. Syncthing can’t access that directory.

Has anyone worked out how to resolve this? Should I move the entire contents of my Umbrel files directory under Syncthing? Is that the way to do it? Feels like a shame to then lose the SMB for when I am at home, as well as the nice, understandable default Umbrel Files directory.

Thanks in advance for any help!