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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

#201

Post by josefrichter »

fabianhjr wrote: post #152
josefrichter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was 10 years ago. Yes, I also started using it because of that. These days the the more important feature (at least for me) is being able to offload rarely used files from my drive. SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.

> being able to offload rarely used files from my drive. > SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive. It sounds like an archival usage rather than syncing or sharing usage.

Well, above all, it's super convenient. The files stay where they are, you just mark them as "online only" and they don't take up space on your disk.

When you click to open such file or folder, it will immediately download back to your disk and you can use it again. You will lose maybe a few seconds once in a blue moon when you need one of them. But you easily gain hundreds of gigabytes of space on your SSD. Just yesterday I right-clicked some folders to mark them "online only" and immediately gained +300GB free space..

Plus of course you can access those files from your phone or ipad too, when needed. Basically I personally have all my work files in Dropbox and don't use additional backup (used Backblaze in the past).

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#202

Post by josefrichter »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #156
josefrichter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was 10 years ago. Yes, I also started using it because of that. These days the the more important feature (at least for me) is being able to offload rarely used files from my drive. SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.

Why not buy an external drive instead? You could also use it as a backup.

External drives are a thing of history. Too much hassle, too much inconvenience, can't access anytime and anywhere I want, etc. What's the benefit of external drive compared to Dropbox really?

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#203

Post by jodrellblank »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #194
jodrellblank wrote: post #150

Wait wait, syyncthing joins you into a cloud and sends your data to/through random people? Why would anyone trust that, over paying Apple or DropBox to send your data only to Amazon S3? How long before "oops, for years anyone who joins the Syncthing mesh has been able to request your data and nobody noticed until now"?

No? Syncthing syncs your data to other instances of syncthing that you authorize, in a p2p mesh.

It joins you into a thing which connects all users of SyncThing. I said "cloud", you said "p2p mesh" the blog said "a fully operational node of Syncthing". No real difference there.

From the syncthing website "Private. None of your data is ever stored anywhere else other than on your computers". From their open protocol page "Relay is a service which relays data between two devices which are not able to connect to each other directly otherwise." How can they claim "None of your data is ever stored anywhere else" if any relay node could save your data as it's transferred through them?

Fine it's "Encrypted. All communication is secured using TLS". But we know that TLS encryption can be flawed (see deprecation of TLS1.3), and we know it can be implemented poorly (see OpenSSL vulnerabilities) and we know metadata and protocol analysis is a thing (analysing how much syncs to/from each node, how often, etc).

What does "Authenticated. Every device is identified by a strong cryptographic certificate." mean if you don't have to setup a certificate authority or buy a verified SSL certificate or use LetsEncrypt or generate a public/private keypair? Would you recognise your SyncThing certificate if you saw it?

How well do you know the SyncThing protocol? Do you know someone in a far away country cannot find a flaw in the implementation which allows them to sync to your device, or insert themselves as a relay node?

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#204

Post by ropeladder »

toastercat wrote: post #134

Just want to come in here to say that Syncthing solved my note-taking app "problem" that I've been bothered with for years. I want my notes as plain text files (or Markdown files to be specific), and I'd like to sync them with my phone. I'd also like to use the text editor of my choice to edit said text files. Cool, I just install Dropbox on my desktop, sync the files, and edit the files with Sublime Text. Oh but huh…

This is basically what I'm doing except I hate plain text editing on a phone touchscreen, so I switched to .org for notes and use orgzly on my phone (which provides a much nicer interface for navigation around files and for quick data entry, imo). Would love an equivalent phone app for markdown but I don't think any exist.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#205

Post by frosted-flakes »

globular-toast wrote: post #133
square_usual wrote: post #49

I love syncthing as much as the next guy on here, but this article feels very much like "why doesn't this square peg fit my round hole?!" Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce. I couldn't go to a less tech savvy friend and say, "Oh, you use Dropbox for backups? Here, use syncthing instead!" For one, most people don't have multiple computers they want to keep in sy…

You can use Syncthing for "cloud" storage as long as you keep an instance online at all times. Syncthing's functionality is a superset of Dropbox etc. People absolutely use Dropbox for device-to-device sync. They are not necessarily interested in the "cloud" backup but just want to send a file to a mate.

Yes, except for "online-only" files and sharing files with others, which don't really work with Syncthing. But I use Syncthing heavily and have no use for those.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#206

Post by smm11 »

I've been messing around with a G4 Mac recently. I've got it dual-booting OS 8.6, and the OS-X Public Beta, with all the software on both sides that I had back in the day, and always wanted. It gets online with a crossover cable connected to the nearby Win11 machine, but that's scary and very limited.

Still, it's fun to roll along now and then like we did when we didn't know what was coming.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#207

Post by chias »

grimgrin wrote: post #50
jwr wrote: 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…

Can you summarize what they maybe introduced/fixed to quell your old review? > over the last week, syncthing has corrupted my git repository twice. I reported this as an issue, but the issue was immediately closed with an explanation I disagree with. > I no longer trust syncthing until this gets resolved, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660438 — I would absolutely be syncing directories containi…

Doing a quick search of reported issues around git repos, basically the trouble is that a git repo folder does not expect to be sync'ed at a file level, because repos are expected to be in different states on different devices, and the state of a repo is represented in the filesystem via the .git directory.

As an example problem-case, say your first device checks out branch A and your second device checks out branch B. Some files conflict, which is likely reasonably handled as any filesync application needs to handle conflicting updates. But any files that are changed in one and not in the other end up getting sync'ed over into the other, including inside your GIT directory, which will very likely lead to an illegal GIT directory state.

As a toy example, pretend that the .git internals require that at any given time, `.git/activebranch/` must contain exactly one file whose filename is the name of the active branch, and git maintains this invariant. By syncing changed files, any filesync utility would break this invariant by resulting in `.git/activebranch/` containing two files, due to each side seeing a new file that the other side needs to acquire. Depending on how such a problem might manifest in real life as a result of performing a file-based sync on two instances of a git directory, this could lead to your .git directory entering a state in which git doesn't know how to interpret it.

--

This isn't a syncthing problem as such, it's a problem of trying to use a file syncing application on the internal state of an application on two different machines with two different states, and expecting the result to be a valid state.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#208

Post by black_puppydog »

janto wrote: post #184
0x0nyandesu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to take my thing and ruin it then be like "shut up it's old"

How can you claim it's your thing? Customers ain't paying for that.

Some were. But your point is valid; a company will move to what _most_ customers want. A FOSS application can keep servicing the (perhaps smaller) original crowd of users.

Re: Computers as I used to love them

#209

Post by dflock »

bodge5000 wrote: post #147
369548684892826 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rclone is very good. Choose any cloud storage provider, and then run it through a nightly cronjob or whatever. https://rclone.org/

Oh sorry, should've been clearer, I'm not looking for backup (I'm currently using backblaze for that), just general storage.

You can use rclone to mount cloud storage folders locally: https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/
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