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@elb @ajroach42 2/ I also looked into Dat and IPFS, but they are neither as capable nor as useful as Syncthing for personal synchronization.

@elb @ajroach42 3/ For, eg, downloading websites, archivebox.io could be very nice. Archive Team also has some wiki pages on how to do it with wget and httrack. There are also plugins like webrecorder that could help.

@elb @ajroach42 4/ What you are really after is more general asynchronous communication. I have a whole blog series about this, including #NNCP and other tools: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/asynchronous will give you all the posts in the series. Many of them are somewhat focused on backups, but should give you some good ideas for other things also. NNCP can use things like USB sticks, serial links, regular Internet connections, Syncthing, etc. as transport.

@elb @ajroach42 5/ The NNCP page on use cases may give you some ideas (whether or not you use NNCP) http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html Their integration page http://www.nncpgo.org/Integration.html also is useful. http://www.nncpgo.org/WARCs.html describes downloading webpages.

@elb @ajroach42 6/ You talked about accessing web pages offline. I've tried that but mostly don't really bother. It is fairly painful (you frequently want to click on a link you don't have). In some cases, for things like larger articles, it can make good sense. But you might want to look into something more like rss2email . Email is already asynchronous and there are lots of ways to get asyncrhonous email across. NNCP is one and documents this workflow at http://www.nncpgo.org/Feeds.html

@elb @ajroach42 7/ Offline email is two separate problems: sending and receiving. Sending can go across BSMTP (delivered "somehow" via NNCP, UUCP, Syncthing, etc). I talk about Exim with NNCP as part of my series here https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10165-asynchronous-email-exim-over-nncp-or-uucp and the NNCP docs go over the Postfix setup. For incoming, you can use OfflineIMAP or an offline-capable mail reader. Alternatively, forwarding to an account you can receive via NNCP/etc to a local mailstore.

@elb @ajroach42 8/ So if you have a VPS or a machine "in town" or whatever, you can do some pretty nice things; take the photos you copied into the "to upload" Syncthing folder and upload them, then delete them out of there. Or a laptop can run those commands directly "in town"

@elb @ajroach42 9/ Finally the two best ways to improve your 4G signal are: 1) height, and 2) antenna. I got one of these https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NBSLNJ6 with a Nighthawk M1 awhile back. Tremendous difference. A booster can only boost what it can receive. A good antenna, mounted high, hardwired into the access point will almost certainly be better. That antenna has "gain", meaning it's directional, so figure out where your best towers are and point it at those.

@elb @ajroach42 11/ Finally, don't understimate the utility of sshing to a VPS somewhere and reading email in text. My qualifications to anser: have lived in Internet-challenged areas for 20 years, frequently travel into no-Internet areas, have experience with modern communication over extremely low bandwidth links (1 to 100Kbps) including LoRA/XBee radio, AX.25 packet radio, and satellite.

@elb @ajroach42 Also, @joeyh lives off-grid and may have lots of ideas to contribute here.