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I think this is a case of people using bidirectional file sync wrong. The point is to make the most up to date version of a file available across multiple devic

I think this is a case of people using bidirectional file sync wrong. The point is to make the most up to date version of a file available across multiple devices, not to act as a backup or for collaboration between multiple users. It works perfectly fine as long as you keep how it works in mind, and probably most importantly don't have multiple users working directly on the same file at once. I've been using these systems for over a decade at this point and never had a problem. And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered.

senkora 6mo ago
+1. It works perfectly if your mental model is: “Every file is only ever written to from a single client, and will be asynchronously made available to all other clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you can safely switch to always writing to the file from a different client”.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo ago
  Bidirectional file sync is also in hot demand from people who don't know the words, "file", "client", "write", "async", "available", or "time" :P
  - babypuncher 6mo ago
    The fact that lay people can and will use a tool incorrectly does not mean said tool is not useful
- unsettledturtle 6mo ago
  Yep. See e.g. steam cloud saves, which is literally just Dropbox for your video game save files. Bidi sync is a super common pattern if you look for it, I'm surprised at all the hate it's getting here.
andrejserafim 6mo ago
I agree. I use syncthing for syncing phones and laptops. For data like photos, which aren't really updated. It works very nice. And for documents updated by one user, moving between devices is totally seamless. That being said i understand how it works at a high level.
donmcronald 6mo ago
> And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered. What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make sure it’s not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely hard to deal with because the backup systems don’t seem to be 100% reliable. I think there are a lot of solutions these days that error on the side of claiming success.

senkora 6mo ago

+1. It works perfectly if your mental model is: “Every file is only ever written to from a single client, and will be asynchronously made available to all other clients, and after some period of time has elapsed you can safely switch to always writing to the file from a different client”.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 6mo ago
Bidirectional file sync is also in hot demand from people who don't know the words, "file", "client", "write", "async", "available", or "time" :P
- babypuncher 6mo ago
  The fact that lay people can and will use a tool incorrectly does not mean said tool is not useful
unsettledturtle 6mo ago
Yep. See e.g. steam cloud saves, which is literally just Dropbox for your video game save files. Bidi sync is a super common pattern if you look for it, I'm surprised at all the hate it's getting here.

andrejserafim 6mo ago

I agree. I use syncthing for syncing phones and laptops. For data like photos, which aren't really updated. It works very nice. And for documents updated by one user, moving between devices is totally seamless. That being said i understand how it works at a high level.

donmcronald 6mo ago

> And if I ever do have one, my real backup solution has me covered. What do you use and how do you test / reconcile to make sure it’s not missing files? I find OneDrive extremely hard to deal with because the backup systems don’t seem to be 100% reliable. I think there are a lot of solutions these days that error on the side of claiming success.