[rarrrrrr]

This is also how SpiderOak's LAN sync works. Both Dropbox and SpiderOak guarantee that the single point of truth is the cloud, for good reason.

Making exceptions to that approach (like allowing individual machines to sync with eachother directly before transferring to the cloud) creates opportunities for conflicts and inconsistencies that are very difficult to resolve because all the information might not be available.

[dfc]

Your second paragraph reads like a defense of CVS. git-annex handles this fine for me on my network at home with multiple machines and multiple copies of the repository/archive/drop-box-folder on each machine.

[lucian1900]

With any VCS, commits are explicit. Dropbox and the like need implicit sync.

[dfc]

Are you familiar with git-annex and its helpful assistant?

[lucian1900]

While it looks cool, it seems to me that it isn't entirely automatic. Sadly the vast majority of people will not go for anything less automatic than Dropbox.

[dfc]

"any changes you make to its folder will automatically be committed to git, and synced to repositories on other computers." [1]

I guess its not automatic in the sense that it does not install itself, but then again neither does dropbox...

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/