Not sure I see the point. Or the complaints people are having here.
The author really should have a backup plan in place. He still doesn't, even though this software lets him sleep easy at night. He's still riding the edge of disaster if a file ever becomes corrupted and then synced. Ut oh. Incremental backups, folks. It's really not that hard.
On the open source side of things, Dropbox and BT Sync aren't really that interesting. You could whip up similar functionality with a bash script, inotify, and rsync in a matter of hours. Dropbox is only relevant because they give you off-site always online dumb storage. There will never be an open source or "trustworthy" solution to a cloud storage service. This Raspberry Pi idea is pretty neat, though. But local encryption is always the answer.
Also, if you have important data that should be encrypted, then it's a pretty stupid thing to have it synced all over the place. You don't want every device acting as a possible point of compromise. Principle of least privilege, and all that.
I read the article. The author started by whining that he lost months of notes. His solution was to beef up his syncing. I still have no idea how he came to that conclusion when backup technology has existed since the dinosaurs. I guess that technology just isn't new or exciting enough to blog about.
I think the author really just wanted an excuse to use his Raspberry Pi.
I do love to tinker. But I don't do foolish things like replace backups with fragile dogshit.
Author here, I've had plenty of excuses to use my Pi in the past, this is just the latest one. I think you are incorrect in characterizing this as "fragile dogshit", this solution is in fact much more robust than my previous cloud solution.
BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.
> BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.
So for example, if a person was working on a thesis document and then accidentally overwrote that with a blank version which gets synced across all the nodes, it would be possible to reverse this action and recover the original thesis document ?
While I haven't exercised this functionality yet my understanding is yes that is possible. You can specify the number of days to store history. (defaults to 30)
most here would keep his/her document versioned in subversion or git. I don't think technically minded individuals don't confuse syncing and backups (or versioning). This however does not apply to non-technical people. That is where dropbox is a win, since they do versioning.
The author really should have a backup plan in place. He still doesn't, even though this software lets him sleep easy at night. He's still riding the edge of disaster if a file ever becomes corrupted and then synced. Ut oh. Incremental backups, folks. It's really not that hard.
On the open source side of things, Dropbox and BT Sync aren't really that interesting. You could whip up similar functionality with a bash script, inotify, and rsync in a matter of hours. Dropbox is only relevant because they give you off-site always online dumb storage. There will never be an open source or "trustworthy" solution to a cloud storage service. This Raspberry Pi idea is pretty neat, though. But local encryption is always the answer.
Also, if you have important data that should be encrypted, then it's a pretty stupid thing to have it synced all over the place. You don't want every device acting as a possible point of compromise. Principle of least privilege, and all that.