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Computers as I used to love them

tonsky.me

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Re: Computers as I used to love them

#31

Post by iveqy »

southerntofu wrote: post #27
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a common problem with git as well. Running git in a dropbox folder is discouraged.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#32

Post by random_upvoter »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #8

OneDrive is pretty good and underrated IMO

I agree it's ok. One time it really bit me in the ass by silently deciding that some random old backup folder of my Desktop, residing on my Onedrive, should actually be my desktop folder and all of a sudden all this old crap appeared on my desktop. No fun was had undoing that. Even now my computer seems to be in some murky situation where my desktop is partly local and partly on my Onedrive, not cool, I haven't really looked into it and I really have no time for this.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#33

Post by qayxc »

All good and well, but isn't comparing Syncthing and Dropbox kind of apples to oranges?

Dropbox has a completely different scope that goes beyond what Syncthing is offering. If you don't require the features Dropbox offers, it's the wrong tool in the first place.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#34

Post by Macha »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #22
southerntofu wrote: post #19

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.

The same could happen with Dropbox/icloud, or even if you just ran two Minecraft instances with the same copy of the world on one machine - Minecraft worlds are not designed for concurrent modification by multiple processes

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#35

Post by NavinF »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #22
southerntofu wrote: post #19

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.

Wouldn’t that happen with Dropbox too? Maybe the race condition just happens less often because it syncs slower?

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#37

Post by [deleted] »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #22
southerntofu wrote: post #19

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.

[deleted]

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#39

Post by XorNot »

southerntofu wrote: post #11
causi wrote: 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.

I'm not sure it's supported in a GUI, but a simple symlink should do the trick. Say your photos folder is called Pictures on one machine, and Photos one another: just ln -s Pictures Photos (admitting you've moved all the contents of photos to Pictures and removed the Photos folder itself) and that should just work (didn't test).

You don't need to do this: when the folder is offered to share to another device, you can specify which folder it's going to go into locally. Internally everything is matched by folder ID codes.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#40

Post by adwn »

southerntofu wrote: post #14
quickthrower2 wrote: post #8

OneDrive is pretty good and underrated IMO

And suffers from the same underlying problem as Dropbox and iCloud: it's profit-driven proprietary software. Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Microsoft as a company? Are you confident that will not change over time?

Are you sure your interests as a user are aligned with that of Syncthing's open source developers? Are you confident that will not change over time?
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