[srslack]

More seriously: Syncthing exists, and it is beautiful.

I set my grandmother up with Synctrayzor and she doesn't know the difference between that and Dropbox.

It is missing the ability to share things with a direct link, or share a repository or folder "easily" (read: in the same way it's done with Dropbox), but the trade off has been worth it for me.

[willtim]

Unison is beautiful, as it has a formal specification with proofs of correctness for its bidirectional syncing. Bi-directional syncing is hard to get right and many devs have been subsequently shown to not understand the problem fully, for example DropBox: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/mysteriesofdropbo...

My instinctive reaction is not to trust any brand new effort without more evidence of its correctness.

[pjc50]

> formal specification with proofs of correctness for its bidirectional syncing

Where can I find more information on this? Search is failing me.

[willtim]

There are lots of papers referenced in the "Mysteries of DropBox" paper above, but I think the full spec is here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/unisonspec.pdf

[pjc50]

Which cloud backend do you have it sync to?

[vetinari]

None.

You run it on your machines and they will sync among themselves. No need for any cloud backend.

Some people with Synology or QNAP run an instance on their NAS.

[pjc50]

But I (and I suspect quite a few other people) want a cloud backend to cover both the disaster-recovery cases and syncing while outside my LAN.

[vetinari]

1) you can sync with a device inside your LAN, even if you are outside, with global discovery (enabled by default).

2) you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.

[amyjess]

> you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.

How much would it cost to hire an admin to set up and maintain that instance?

The whole point of Dropbox is that I don't have to do any work.

[vetinari]

There are many possibilities, as it is not a pre-packaged solution.

For example, if you have Synology or QNAP, there are packages to sync with cloud providers, like Backblaze B2, Amazon S3, Azure Cloud Storage, etc. So if one of your syncthing sync instances (which you can make with few clicks) is such a device, with few more clicks you can choose your cloud platform and backup to that.

Or you can be using something entirely different. That's the beauty, you can use whatever fits your needs and budget, you don't have to fit yourself to limitations of one or two pre-packaged solutions. You can do something entirely different, e.g. if someone from your family also has some NAS, you can backup to each others devices and not rely on third parties at all. The possibilities are limitless.

[Fnoord]

Organizations already have such an admin, and workers can sync whilst they're at work. Not very difficult to set up, and saves tons of costs (although a NAS is a small initial investment to make it doesn't require much maintenance).

Individuals don't, but most individuals have no clue about the repercussions of hosting their plaintext data on Dropbox in the USA. Its a ticking timebomb.

[Fnoord]

They think they want, but they don't.

For every human being on the planet needs their own privacy. Its a common theme in the EU, but it isn't only important within the EU.

Therefore, there are two viable options:

1) You store your data locally (encrypted if you want to protect against burglars).

2) You store your data remotely, but encrypt it before you send it and decrypt it after you receive it (public key cryptography).

There is no other, viable, long-term option. Dropbox's solution is a short term solution.

Now, the question is whether you really need to sync to your LAN right away. You most likely don't. You can just sync in the evening and at night while your device(s) recharge. If you really need to sync ad hoc you have the option to punch holes in your firewall, or use a VPN. One opportunity for innovation here is to allow a user to define what must be synced right away over WAN and what shouldn't. Another opportunity is to make cloud backups easier. But these require the above requirement #2, and as you might know, public key cryptography just doesn't seem to be user-friendly.

[dnel]

I sync to my NAS where it gets backed up to b2 using duply, cloud backup is out of scope for Syncthing itself.

[philipov]

I can't read that name without rearranging it to Snytching. Am I dyslexic?

[Fnoord]

Yeah.

Speaking of which, you can use such together with Cryptomator or GPG or whatever and synchronize your encrypted files. To any cloud. Or you can sync it to your NAS which stores them on an encrypted filesystem.

You can do that with Dropbox/Google Drive/etc as well. But I'd use that as yet another encrypted backup of my most important NAS content.

[gsich]

The android app sucks. No proper SD card support last I checked.