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Computers as I used to love them

tonsky.me

21–30 of 265 posts

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#22

I disagree about the Dropbox folder criticism. It's actually simplifies things a lot: whatever you put there is synced. Very straightforward. You won't break anything. Syncthing, on the other hand, is far too geeky and easy to ruin things if you somehow sync a rapidly updated folder. I've moved a few people to Syncthing and in the end they all were not very happy with it for one reason or another. It also isn't as cl…

> ruin things if you somehow sync a rapidly updated folder (...) It also isn't as clear on the sync state of a file. Do you have a link/resource elaborating on these questions?

Just from experience. The person was syncing a folder with a minecraft world, and of course ruined it by running 2 instances simultaneously.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#24
I suppose I’ve just become used to saying no to a bunch of things when installing Dropbox, but once that’s done I have no interactions with it at all. I don’t remember being pestered at any point recently and I’ve got it on three devices. I keep waiting for it to annoy me in some way that causes me to find another solution but it’s yet to happen. I migrated several G Suite accounts to Fastmail recently so I suspect it’s my longest running paid subscription at this point.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#25
post #2

Have you heard of NextCloud ( https://nextcloud.com/ ) ?

NextCloud is great but like any webapp suffers from bloatedness and cryptic errors. If you've ever tried uploading terabytes with the web client, you know what i'm talking about.

Also, performance (read bandwidth usage) isn't all that great with NextCloud. PHP-FPM was more designed for concurrent execution of multiple stateless requests server-side (PHP) than for sending raw bytes as soon as possible to the disk.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#26
post #9

I've been using Syncthing for about a year now, with multiple computers, and it's fantastic. Dropbox has become a real pain over the years (I've also been a paid Dropbox customer for a long time): * adding bloat and features that I don't want or need * constantly nagging me for upgrades * lying that the admin password is required (it isn't) * consuming large amounts of CPU when anything changes anywhere in the filesy…

https://craft.co/dropbox/funding-rounds

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ruin things if you somehow sync a rapidly updated folder (...) It also isn't as clear on the sync state of a file. Do you have a link/resource elaborating on these questions?

Just from experience. The person was syncing a folder with a minecraft world, and of course ruined it by running 2 instances simultaneously.

So the caveat is that concurrently writing to the same file on separate machines will lead to data corruption? Is that reproducible with other files than Minecraft saves, or can it be that Minecraft introduces corruption by amending the on-disk file with a delta of currently-running changes not accounting for the possibility that the file has been altered?

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#28
post #5

Does Syncthing allow you to sync two differently-named folders as one folder while preserving the respective names? For example, your pictures folder may not be called the same thing on your phone and computer, or across Windows and Linux, or you want to sync game save files between Android and Windows.

Yes, it does. I do this for multiple folder- i.e. the pictures folder on my phone is called whatever android has decided to call it this year and it syncs with my pictures folder on my desktop.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#30

OneDrive is pretty good and underrated IMO

The performance of the Mac client is terrible. Simply clicking the menu bar icon sometimes takes several seconds to bring up a terrible looking menu that smells like Electron.

I wouldn't necessarily call it terrible, as all the big 3 cloud storage services just wrap Web UIs in a window instead of doing a fully native app. The file syncing functionality works just fine for me every time, compared to iCloud, which regularly will stop syncing silently, despite it being better integrated into the Finder.

I'd rather have reliable syncing with an Electron wrapper than a fully native UI with broken sync.

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