I work across multiple computers. My desktop is Arch, my main laptop is a Macbook, and I also have a Framework 13. Normally I use my desktop at home and take the mac for traveling. In all cases, I need access to my files.

I think about my data in terms of tiers. I have stuff I frequently access and stuff I rarely access. My head canon for the first tier is “working set”; that's my documents, music, and project files. The working set should be available and fast. Rarely accessed stuff can live on slow storage or offline.

There are two schools of thought regarding storage. One prioritizes efficiency; data should be stored in one location accessible to all clients. This maximizes total available storage space at the expense of availability and access speed. The other trades storage for availability and access speed.

In the past my laptop didn't have enough space to store my working set. The drives just weren't big enough, and then they got big enough but they were so expensive that it only made sense to put them in a workstation (desktop). In 2025, annoyed by the downsides of network storage, I started thinking about this explicitly and had the following realizations:

1. My working set is ~4tb
2. m.2 NVMe drives can now accommodate that working set for a reasonable price
3. which means I can now have my working set completely stored on my laptop.

Due for a laptop upgrade anyway, I got 8tb of storage on my new one and then set about collating my working set into a portable structure. After that I installed syncthing on every device and started a massive synchronization campaign that took about a week to settle out. With careful preparation there were almost no sync conflicts.

At this point in time I exist in storage nirvana. I work on my desktop. Grab my laptop and catch an airplane; all the data I was working on is on my laptop and I pick up where I left off. No need to connect to airplane wifi. Get where I'm going, connect my laptop; it's syncing everything to my home server and desktop in the background.

I only have 1tb of storage on my phone, so it can't store everything; and even if I wanted to, syncthing on iOS basically doesn't work because of the lack of background services. This is completely fine though, because 1) I don't really do much work on my phone and 2) my phone is always online. If I need access to something from my phone, I can download it from my home server. If my phone is completely offline and I *really* need access to my data, it's on my laptop. And if my phone is offline and I don't have my laptop, well, I will do something else.