First off, as someone who has spent many hours trying to use dat, I agree 100% with your assessment.
I have been using dat command line tool to p2p synchronize files on a LAN (and also over the internet) for a year or two now. The latest version is more stable for me than than the previous version and I really love it. It synchronizes files across multiple computers nearly instantly.
I'm glad the dat cli is still working for you. It's on an older protocol codebase and won't be maintained, the hyp cli is meant to replace it going forward.
If someone would decide to use either dat or hyper as a base for a project today: what are the differences?
Is hyper going to replace dat as an advancing network protocol? Is peer discovery different, or did hyperdrive change...or...?
(I am very confused about dat/hyper efforts, as I've been following it a bit over the last year)
I've seen that beaker changed to hypercore/hyperdrive...so my current assumption is that the hyper protocol is the web browser effort, rather than the other parts of infrastructure.
Are there incompatibilities in both protocols, or is hypercore trying to refactor its codebase in order to say, remove legacy dependencies that might not be necessary anymore?
Dat is essentially the old version of Hypercore Protocol (aka "Hyper"). We had to make a set of breaking changes and decided to rebrand. So- if you're looking for a base, use the hyper stuff.
The changes included a switch to a DHT for peer lookup and data-structure reworks that improved speed and scaling by quite a bit.
Does the new cli allow multiwriting yet? I'd like multiple computers to be able to modify the dataset.
Similarly, it seems the protocol supports keeping around all versions of the hyperdrive, but it looks like that isnt made available via the cli. Is this correct?
That sounds cool. Would you mind telling a bit more about your Setup? How does it compare to Syncthing? I'm still looking for a p2p file sync solution that can mix locally and remotely stored files (and actually works at all).
I dont know syncthing so cant comment on that. My setup is very simple. `dat share` running on my laptop and `dat <hash>` on all of my servers. The servers are running inside docker/k8s in a daemonset so every server in the cluster has a recent version of the files. Some benefits of this over say a shared NFS mount hosted in the cluster:
- I can use my local editor online or offline in the same config
- my editor doesnt hang as it saves over a network connection
- live reload apps running on the servers will pickup the changes immediately. inotify doesnt work on nfs mounted drives.
One main disadvantage in some cases is it doesnt currently support multi-writer. the servers mounting the dat are read only. I'm pretty sure this is changing in newer versions, but I'm not sure on roadmap.
I have been using dat command line tool to p2p synchronize files on a LAN (and also over the internet) for a year or two now. The latest version is more stable for me than than the previous version and I really love it. It synchronizes files across multiple computers nearly instantly.