[karpathy]

I have a flipped perspective of this. In my experience, Apple tries to be too clever and does many unintuitive things behind the scenes so that "it just works".

I went through a horror scenario that scared me when I bought a new iPhone and my old pictures and videos for some reason did not sync over to the new device. I thought for a few brief moments that I lost 2 years worth of pictures and videos and that was enough to scar me permanently.

I now periodically back up all my pictures/videos from my iPhone and iPad to a folder in my Dropbox. Seeing all the files listed out in my folders gives me comfort, because I know there's no attempts at cleverness going haywire in the background, erasing and moving things around when I click "yes" or "no" to some popup question that I don't fully understand.

So I'm not sure what the right answer is. Sometimes I wish it wasn't as much magical as completely transparent about what's happening. Maybe there could be some nice UI that shows exactly what is stored, and people could somehow drag and drop data between devices?

[Adirael]

You can use the Dropbox App to do that for you, it will sync your media with your Dropbox automatically.

I think in this sync issue DRM is at fault. Sync between old iPods and iTunes worked that way because music was DRM'ed and they didn't want you to give your friend your 40GB iPod and let him copy all your music. It has been carried away too long, there should be two way sync.

This is a special pain in the ass when you have more than one Mac.

[karpathy]

Ah! Definitely not using Dropbox app to do the syncing for me automatically. Again, too much magic for something too important. I can't be guaranteed that the Dropbox app maybe somehow loses authentication and silently stops syncing, or maybe I edit a photo on iPhone and its filename is unchanged in the filysystem and it doesn't get synced over, or anything similarly weird and technical goes wrong.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but all I want is a perfect and completely transparent guarantee that I have a complete snapshot of my most important files. I'm willing to do the little manual work for it.