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I've tested all of the major file sync tools and nothing compares to Dropbox's ability to simply sync files very well (merge conflicts, offline vs online, etc).

by mbesto 7y ago

GordonS 7y ago
This surprises me. I tried Dropbox a few years ago and found it's conflict resolution, even with just 2 machines, to be shockingly bad - it was constantly notifying about conflicts, even when there really shouldn't have been one. Going from the Dropbox forums at the time, a lot of people were having similar issues. The performance on Windows was also ridiculous - it literally rendered my PC useless for 1h on every boot. I poked around and discovered that the Dropbox client was basically some Python scripts that enumerated and hashed every.single.file on startup, then used an unreliable Windows API to check for realtime changes after that - how a company the size of Dropbox thinks that is a good idea truely boggles the mind! NTFS change journal? File system minifilter driver? Nah, let's hash every file on startup and use a the easiest realtime change detection available, just to ensure we miss some changes - oh, and we'll do it all in Python, just to make sure performance is as bad as possible! Anyway, the final straw was when it deleted a lot of data because of a "conflict". At the time, the restore mechanism was terrible if you wanted to restore more than a handful of files - you basically had to restore files one-by-one, paging through hundreds of pages of files (I don't know if it's still like that). There was also some data that was permanently gone. Dropbox support was also a joke - you had to post on a public forum and hope they replied. And if they did reply, they always shut you down with "no, Dropbox wouldn't delete your files", "no, Dropbox wouldn't raise a conflict for that" or whatever. Again, I don't know if it's still like that, but it really left a sour taste in my mouth, and coupled with the comedy Windows client, I won't be touching it ever again. I ended up building my own solution using Seafile, using Azure blob storage as a backend. I run Seafile and Minio in Docker containers on a cheap Azure VM, and the whole thing "just worked" from the get-go - it's much easier than it sounds. Haven't looked back since!

I've tested all of the major file sync tools and nothing compares to Dropbox's ability to simply sync files very well (merge conflicts, offline vs online, etc).

by mbesto 7y ago

I've tested all of the major file sync tools and nothing compares to Dropbox's ability to simply sync files very well (merge conflicts, offline vs online, etc).

GordonS 7y ago

This surprises me. I tried Dropbox a few years ago and found it's conflict resolution, even with just 2 machines, to be shockingly bad - it was constantly notifying about conflicts, even when there really shouldn't have been one. Going from the Dropbox forums at the time, a lot of people were having similar issues. The performance on Windows was also ridiculous - it literally rendered my PC useless for 1h on every boot. I poked around and discovered that the Dropbox client was basically some Python scripts that enumerated and hashed every.single.file on startup, then used an unreliable Windows API to check for realtime changes after that - how a company the size of Dropbox thinks that is a good idea truely boggles the mind! NTFS change journal? File system minifilter driver? Nah, let's hash every file on startup and use a the easiest realtime change detection available, just to ensure we miss some changes - oh, and we'll do it all in Python, just to make sure performance is as bad as possible! Anyway, the final straw was when it deleted a lot of data because of a "conflict". At the time, the restore mechanism was terrible if you wanted to restore more than a handful of files - you basically had to restore files one-by-one, paging through hundreds of pages of files (I don't know if it's still like that). There was also some data that was permanently gone. Dropbox support was also a joke - you had to post on a public forum and hope they replied. And if they did reply, they always shut you down with "no, Dropbox wouldn't delete your files", "no, Dropbox wouldn't raise a conflict for that" or whatever. Again, I don't know if it's still like that, but it really left a sour taste in my mouth, and coupled with the comedy Windows client, I won't be touching it ever again. I ended up building my own solution using Seafile, using Azure blob storage as a backend. I run Seafile and Minio in Docker containers on a cheap Azure VM, and the whole thing "just worked" from the get-go - it's much easier than it sounds. Haven't looked back since!