211–220 of 265 posts
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…
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Both are solutions to sync a folder across multiple devices. The fact that dropbox added a bunch of extra features over the years is irrelevant to most users.
That's like arguing Photoshop is too complicated compared to MS Paint, because both can resize and crop images. If all you want to do is syncing folders across devices, use a tool that does just that. Just to emphasize how this is relevant, here's what Dropbox says about what it is [0]. > What is Dropbox? > Dropbox is a place where all your team’s content comes together. There's nothing in that very first sentence of…
Perhaps the author is coming from a similar place. History matters. If someone sells you a product, and then completely changes the scope of said product, it's a bit odd for people to complain when you start looking for alternatives that fit the scope of the product you initially bought, no?
The biggest gap I've noticed in SyncThing right now is that their iOS client doesn't work well. It's a third party solution you have to pay for, and it can't sync into app folders or the new iOS file paradigm introduced in recent versions of iOS.
People just expect that every click and tap on a UI has a spinner – even in their car.
What's even easier and you don't need to install anything is plain SSH and rsync and scp and sshfs?
Is this a troll comment? That's not even close to the same thing. Rsync and scp copy data from one computer to another in one direction. Scp would require you replacing entire directories. Both rsync and scp would need to be ran manually be the user. Sshfs doesn't sync files. You go offline and your files are gone.
It amounts to about the same difference as the difference between DropBox and syncthing (e.g. they are not close to the same thing either but as far as a certain use case which is that of the vast majority of users...they are the same)
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It’s not recommended to sync a git repo
I have heard that before, but no good reason why. If a synchronization software can't handle a git repository, what else is it not able to handle? After all, a git repository is just a bunch of files and in my case not particular big once.
If you use Syncthing peer-to-peer and/or have concurrent modifications to different peers before a full sync, you can run into problems. It’s not really designed for that, it’s optimised from the single user sharing individual files on multiple devices case.
Doing anything better here is incredibly hard in a peer-to-peer system on the level of abstraction that Syncthing operates on.
I think renames might be/may have been problematic because it tries to be smart and handle them efficiently. If it did the naive thing of delete followed by creation, consistency would be better, but performance would be worse.
The author is right. When you get rid of corporate cruft, computers are just computers. They belong to you and they perform computation (and network operations). I use almost exclusively FOSS, and I hear the scary points like you'll be out of the loop, won't be able to talk to some friends, it's more maintenance, etc. Some of that is true some of the time, but the trade off is your machine does what you want it to do and only what you want it to do. It is well worth it.
the only reason why apple even became a reasonable option was because they went back to nextstep which was built on mach and various FOSS userland (rebranded as darwin).
Yup, this overall experience of straightforward contained executables vs the entire mess we have now is vastly better. Also a big fan of Syncthing, and have now found something better: Bvckup 2. It has the same download -run experience, more controllable options, and runs a LOT faster by design. No commercial connection other than being a satisfied customer.
Just looked up Bvckup 2 and it's completely different. First of all, it's windows only which is a deal breaker for me. It also doesn't appear to be open source. There is also a pricing scheme so you have to constantly have to check to see what features you have. The cheapest $30 version doesn't even come with a background service. That's only in the Pro version. And it's the same with the command line tool. I also fi…
I don't think opensource or the platform was an issue, since the original article was on a Mac.
I'm happy to pay for good software, and Bvckup2 does an excellent job of backups for me. It's easy to point it to an empty directory tree and have it replicate the entire volume rapidly, or point it to a previous backup and update only the diffs. Fancier backup systems are of course available, but I prefer lightweight and straight copies, not extra compression or other formats. If you have something better, please let me know (definitely more helpful than merely complaining about features you don't like).