Tragic
Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
141–150 of 429 posts
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#142Dropbox isn't even the cheapest or best file syncing service, they're basically all a commodity at this point and if they don't want you as customers... just go elsewhere.
Would you kindly provide recommendations? I'm looking for a sync service which can run on windows AND linux (which is why onedrive and google drive are out)...and i'm willing to pay a fair monthly fee.
I would recommend Syncthing. Fully open source. It is however self-hosted. But they have clients for basically everything, including mobile phones.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that…
I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system . I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html ) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution…
Network file systems are harder than they sound, and writing additional file systems for Windows is a huge pain. Even Microsoft's own solution - OneDrive - they've had to walk back slightly on their "placeholder" implementation for detached operation, which was great when it worked but occasionally managed to blow up badly.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#144This sounds fine to me. Ya'll are making sound like they're refuseing to sync because the FS is encryped. The file systems mentioned are really old. You can use newer FS's that are encrypted. They need to support extended attributes for obvious reasons.
Age has nothing to do with it. If you keep dismissing tech due to age, you're going to be spending your life re-inventing the wheel and rediscovering the same problems and mistakes over and over again.
By the way, NTFS dates back to 1993. It not included in the expiry list. Every file system mentioned as losing support is newer than that, and they're all under active development and getting better all the time.
XFS became the default file system in Redhat 7 and derivatives. ecryptfs is the default for home directories on Ubuntu. They're talking about wiping out a significant proportion of Linux users here.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The modern alternative is probably Syncthing. I intermittently maintain a list of these things at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... ; none of them have ever been precisely what I wanted. The cheap alternative to Dropbox with Linux support you want was "Hubic" from OVH (edit: now discontinued)
How about Keybase? It has a pretty seamless files experience, I find. Open source, end-to-end encryption, Windows client, painless sync, free for 250GB...
Completely agree. I'm not sure why someone would choose Dropbox over Keybase nowadays.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
The modern alternative is probably Syncthing. I intermittently maintain a list of these things at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... ; none of them have ever been precisely what I wanted. The cheap alternative to Dropbox with Linux support you want was "Hubic" from OVH (edit: now discontinued)
But where would you sync to? Dropbox also keeps a copy of your files which makes it attractive without the need to set up configure your home nas. Although it's arguably a more intelligent decission to share private files not with a company like dropbox.
> But where would you sync to?
You sync across your devices (or anything where you can run a standalone binary). Phone, PC, server, whatever. It's pretty good and very stable when your packager doesn't fuck up the service file (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/net/syncthing/files/sy...).
> without the need to set up configure your home nas
That's only needed if you need access to your files from the outside world (which is probably a bad idea). For instance, my ~/Documents are syncthing-only, not available through my Nextcloud instance. Can't access my payslip from last year on my phone. Can't have it stolen through that channel either!
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
More seriously: Syncthing exists, and it is beautiful. I set my grandmother up with Synctrayzor and she doesn't know the difference between that and Dropbox. It is missing the ability to share things with a direct link, or share a repository or folder "easily" (read: in the same way it's done with Dropbox), but the trade off has been worth it for me.
Unison is beautiful, as it has a formal specification with proofs of correctness for its bidirectional syncing. Bi-directional syncing is hard to get right and many devs have been subsequently shown to not understand the problem fully, for example DropBox: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/mysteriesofdropbo... My instinctive reaction is not to trust any brand new effort without more evidence of its correctne…
> formal specification with proofs of correctness for its bidirectional syncing
Where can I find more information on this? Search is failing me.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
But where would you sync to? Dropbox also keeps a copy of your files which makes it attractive without the need to set up configure your home nas. Although it's arguably a more intelligent decission to share private files not with a company like dropbox.
Similar to the Mac backup software Arq, just give me a list of object stores I can point to (Backblaze would be my first pick). Although, for my purposes, I think iCloud Files is going to turn into most of what I need from Dropbox fast enough that'll be where I move to.
For whatever reason, no other service does binary delta uploads like Dropbox, including Google drive. No other service takes advantage of the local network when syncing multiple PC's on the same LAN.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that…
I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system . I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html ) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution…
> Which is why we’re all using an internet powered by Javascript, Electron apps on the desktop, etc. Worse is better.
That's being a bit alarmist, isn't it? It's not worse is better. It's the right amount of compromises is better. Or, "good enough is better".
Perfection usually has diminishing returns and is rarely obtainable. Worse is not better. Good enough is better; objectively so.
Re: Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which cloud backend do you have it sync to?
None. You run it on your machines and they will sync among themselves. No need for any cloud backend. Some people with Synology or QNAP run an instance on their NAS.
But I (and I suspect quite a few other people) want a cloud backend to cover both the disaster-recovery cases and syncing while outside my LAN.