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It amazes me that Syncthing handles rapidly-changing files better for me than Dropbox. Where Dropbox has left different versions of files on different computers
by dragly 10y ago
It amazes me that Syncthing handles rapidly-changing files better for me than Dropbox. Where Dropbox has left different versions of files on different computers even after they have changed multiple times, Syncthing happily synchronizes them without issues. And the fact that Syncthing is open source and allows me to keep files on my own machines is a big plus. However, I would love to see a paid option for easy backup of selected files to a machine in the cloud. Some people want their files backed up and accessible through a web service and I wish I could recommend Syncthing to them as well.
- XorNot 10y agoDoes syncthing have a backup option? Last I recall it didn't, which kind of soured me on it - in an ideal world every sync operation would be prefaced with "send a backup to one of my backup endpoints first".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- noja 10y agoDepends on your use case. You can configure it to keep versions of files: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html (But Syncthing is intended for file syncing, not backup.)
- SunSparc 10y agoBacking up your filesystem can and really should be part of an entirely different process. Let syncthing focus on syncing. Get CrashPlan, rsync, or some other process going on your filesystem for backups. Unless you are hoping for backing up every single version of your documents.
- bedros 10y agocheck out borg backup, it's my favorite backup tool
- ptman 10y agohttps://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
- jamwt 10y agoJust a heads up: that almost certainly means SyncThing is failing to recognize some classes of conflicts and concurrency races, and is destroying some changes. Doing this right is a hard problem. I know they can be a pain to deal with, but we don't spin out conflicts for no reason! Disclosure: I work on the Dropbox sync engine.
- growse 10y agoDo you have any specific bug or design reference to the Syncthing codebase that illustrates this, or do you simply believe that it's impossible to do it faster than Dropbox does it? Fwiw, i frequently get notifications from Syncthing that it's found a conflict it can't resolve and asks me to resolve manually.
- jamwt 10y agoSorry, not super familiar with Syncthing. It's definitely not impossible to do better than Dropbox, but to some degree, as in all things, it's a function of engineering resources, telemetry, and usage. We've likely put 25-100x more resources into solving this problem over the last 10 years, and we just have a lot more data b/c we have 100s of millions of users on lots of platforms using Dropbox with every application you can imagine. So we're able to tease out the "long tail" of weird file system and application behavior in a way that's very difficult for smaller projects. Truly durable conflict management in the face of arbitrary mutations by user applications on the filesystem ends up being a really, really hard problem to cover exhaustively. The Dropbox client handles literally hundreds of special cases. So, yeah, I believe it is (in general) safe to assume that Dropbox is probably doing A-more-correct-thing for a complicated (and admittedly confusing) reason when it comes to sync behavior. But we're not perfect--we do still find surprises from time to time, so feel free to contact support if you see something that looks wrong!
- amelius 10y agoAre you saying that you solve conflicts specifically for different types of applications (e.g., Word, Photoshop, Excel)? That's impressive. However, now I'm wondering how I get my own apps supported.