Ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems

Post by anderspitman » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #398

martinp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syncthing is a great piece of software. I configured it on three of my machines in March and I've had zero issues since. In fact, it has worked so well that I don't even think about it. One of the machines even runs an old version found in Debian stable repos, but there has been no issues syncing with machines running newer versions. Only downside for me is that there's no iOS client.

Is Syncthing here to stay or will it morph into a nextcloud or a btsync or that ubuntu thing or be abandonner in 6 months ?

Post by IronBacon » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 8:59 AM UTC

beardbound wrote: post #235

rcarmo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home directory encryption via ecryptfs is now the default in most Ubuntu variants, and it would be insane not to attempt to support it. That said, given that my Dropbox subscription just renewed (and that Linux is pretty much the only reason I'm still using it, since there is no OneDrive client I can rely on), I am really sad this seems to be a future direction for Dropbox.

I use Google drive, but the Linux support was awful and I started using insync. It's about $25 for a lifetime license and I love it. I run Ubuntu with encrypted home and have for years. It works great and I highly recommend it, and I don't work there, just a happy user. The Nautilus integration is decent too.

Post by cperciva » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #248

ape4 wrote: post #234

Its too bad there isn't a standard for Dropbox-like functionally yet. An RFC that everyone can write to.

Technically there is WebDAV. Yeah I know, but it's there and it's a spec. Another de-facto spec is rsync, iirc tarsnap was basically built on that. At some point there might have been even a business or two that offered rsync access.

Post by Zak » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 12:18 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #385

Zak wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People I know who definitely have this problem tend to work in creative fields - especially musicians and (digital) visual artists. They almost universally have a bunch of files with names like project_final2_revised_reallyfinal3_with_edits_from_sally.psd. Of course, a solution that works well with all the different binary file formats people in those fields use wouldn't be easy.

Ah, that. Yes, absolutely I'd love for a solution that fixes that. It would definitely need to work with large files though, which categorically precludes Git. The first point, I think, would be building a delta engine with case-specific code for the most common ubiquitous file formats, like docx, xlsx, psd, etc. Of course it wouldn't be able to be perfect with everything but it would certainly be better than eg just…

Post by marci » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:56 PM UTC

jkaplowitz wrote: post #365

ahnick wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? If you lose access to your dotfiles and OneNote notebooks for 5 or 10 minutes (that would be one long tunnel) that's completely unacceptable? This also sounds like a daily commute that could have easily been planned around if that time is really that important. Besides, when I work with Keybase I copy the files to my machine ahead of time to a local directory, so I likely would never notice such a drop in con…

Airplanes are a common case where people have long stretches without connectivity, either due to not paying for wifi or any if the other reasons it might be unavailable or unusable. Being on a NYC subway train is an even more interesting case, because depending on the precise client setup there's often intermittent or bad connectivity but rarely a good sustained connection between stations. As in most of the world, s…