Speaking as an everyday user of DFS, I only have one response to that; "har-har-har-har-har-har-har" and what's more "har".
It performs very poorly over a "slow" link (such as my 1.3Mbps "broadband"). I get all kinds of weird artefacts - inability to open files that are actually local to my machine, inability to rename files, being told that files don't exist when I can see them on my desktop. Not impressed.
Sadly not.
Is that what you need or just you want a script/program that copies the stuff to a backup when connected. Is there any need to sync stuff across multiple chrome devices or do they always use the same one?
Proper automatic syncing is what's needed.
I have considered triggered syncing with Unison but I'm trying to avoid half arsed home brew nonsense that will come back to haunt me.
It needs to be "user proof".
I do manually unison sync my own laptop over ssh, but even I do not remember to do that all the time -
I'm quite impressed with Google Drive - seems to "just work" and you can pin certain files for offline use.
But I have very large sets of files I'd like to make available, so not uploading those to google (100's GB or photos and home videos for one).
And I don't want google or those wankers at GCHQ or the NSA rifling through my stuff... Granted I expect they could hack my servers, but they'd have to be bothered as opposed to having it all on a plate.
Think it might be time just to whack one or two of those "self hosted cloud" packages on my fileserver and see what gives...
Interesting I use kerberos. If it needs LDAP too, that will be painful...
I found NFSv4 to be much the same - an enormous curve of dependencies and changes...
Thank you..
Isn't that what dropbox does?
Ian
Yes - but I'm after a self hosted solution - for 100's GB cloud is neither cost effective nor trustworthy.
Google do infinite free storage of pictures below 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels. You could encrypt your data put it into pictures as "noise" and save as much of it as you like. There are plenty of free to use pictures about so I doubt if you would ever run out.
Whilst academically interesting, this is not exactly a practical solution...
The problem with git is it's all or nothing. If you put everything in one repo then you get the whole lot, you can't be selective. So it means the kitchen PC has to get the bank statements as well as the recipes, or whatever it may be. It also means you have to update everything, which is annoying when you're on a slow/metered link.
If you start partitioning into multiple repos then you end up with dozens of repos to (forget to) sync, and you can't easily move things between repos.
Subversion allows partial checkouts, but doesn't work offline. I haven't yet found a distributed VCS that works sensibly in this situation. Though I haven't explored some of the options mentioned here:
Theo
Yep - this is definitely taking the wrong direction.
The right direction is a well designed network protocol for handling "remote storage". Google managed it, so did Dropbox.
Now I really must go test one of the opensource systems and see if any of them come close. I was hoping someone might already have tried one, but evidently not...
I'm looking forward to some little NAS boxes in the future that can be "private dropbox type servers" so all your pads and phones and chromebooks can tap into your own private store.
Last time I checked Google Drive couldn't handle nested folders
There was a time when Microsoft had Briefcases that provided similar functionality, but, although I had this working between my PCs running W98 at one time, I had to disable it, and the sort of reasons I did so might be more widely applicable ...
For one thing, each sync always seemed to take an absurdly long time.
Databases were a particular problem. At the time I had a couple of Access databases, and because they had to be synced record by record or field by field (I can't remember which) that would ratchet up the time taken even more. Further, one of the database copies had to be 'master' and the others 'slaves'. If the master became corrupted, it was supposedly possible to promote one of the slaves in its place, but in reality it wasn't always possible to do so.
Dragging and dropping a file into the Briefcase had an unwelcome side-effect, the details of which I cannot now remember, but ISTR that it arose from the fact that the Briefcase mechanism would instantly try to replicate it around, leading to losing control of the PC while the CPU maxed out doing it.
These days I find DeltaCopy, a CygWin version of rsync, to be much better, though of course it doesn't replicate databases field by field or even record by record. Also, I needed to replace a DLL to get it to handle correctly files with foreign characters in their names. Also, I have to run chown/chmod afterwards on the server, to give the files the correct permissions to be available via the Samba shares - it's always struck me that there's probably a way of doing this automatically on a file by file basis, but I've not yet investigated thoroughly enough to find one.
Well, in theory yes, but on my Android phone, I find that even things marked as favourites, for which local copies are supposedly stored, might not actually be so local - it's difficult to be certain one way or another, because Dropbox doesn't work on a phone the same way as it does on a PC. For example when I reach the supermarket my weekly Shopping List always takes some time to load; it appears to be downloadng slowly over the phone network from the server rather than loading quickly from a copy on the phone. When I examine the phone's memory, I don't find the same folder hierarchy as I do on my PC, and I can't tell whether there's really a local copy there or not.
It's not helped by the fact that on a phone Dropbox is far more difficult to configure. On a PC, via your local LAN, you can pre-copy all the files into a suitable directory on a new PC, and then install Dropbox, telling it which directory to use. It then very quickly examines the indicated folder and marks it up to date. This means you get the files stored where YOU want them - not where Dropbox, or, heaven forbid, Microsoft thinks you ought to put them - and the first sync takes a minute or two instead of an hour or two.
Really I'd like to be able to do this on my phone. I could then just copy the lot via the USB cable, designate the folder, and let Dropbox spend a minute or two deciding that there was nothing else to do. Subsequently my Shopping List, etc, would load in an instant the way it does on a PC. However, in the real world, I have to spend more time than it's worth trying to decide which are most important and designating those as favourites in the hope that they may, or may not, be stored locally.
It certainly can now - I have several 2-3 levels deep.
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Coming back to this (and adding uk.d-i-y in)
Just slapped a trial version on my laptop and it does "work" as in my android phone can see a shared folder. Claims to be able to handle sync-ing like Dropbox too.
Anyone else had any experience with Tonido? It costs (well the version with less limitations, and I have NO problem with that).
The world is moving on - I have a massive repo of files (TBs) on my various linux servers and I need to make them available to chromebooks, pads and phones...
The only thing I can find wrong is it does not seem to be able to map drive users to POSIX users (with the server running on linux). This is a bit annoying as I have media trees with mixed ownership files.
For a family of 4 I guess I can fudge around it with ACLs... But I am once again reminded of the old and tested mantra:
"Those who do not understand unix are doomed to reinvent it. Poorly."
:)
I upload edited pix to the picasa site, which was unlimited for free as long as the max dimension was 1600 pixels. Has this increased to 2048 too? I really don't like dealing with google's photo site...
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