by XorNot on 5/12/14, 6:01 PM
Can we please please please make it a standard that synchronization tools spell out how they handle conflicts on the front page.
Bittorrent Sync just overwrites files based on last mod time (terrible option). What does this do? Does it support backups? Versioning?
by stinos on 5/12/14, 6:59 PM
Since we're listing alternatives here: I setup SeaFile (
http://seafile.com/) a couple of months ago and I'm loving it so far. Mainly because it has client-side encryption and allows a single client to sync with different servers and selectively choose which 'libraries' (basically directories that are under sync) to use. Typical usecase is having a personal server for personal files and another one at the office for work-related stuff.
by pjkundert on 5/12/14, 8:14 PM
Has anyone else taken a look at Ori (
http://ori.scs.stanford.edu):
> Ori is a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes.
It seems well thought out, and competitive with many of the other approaches mentioned here. It uses Merkle trees (as does Git) that encompasses the file system structure and full history.
by abalone on 5/12/14, 8:38 PM
"Replacement" is too strong a word here. P2P sync requires at least 2 peers to be online at once. For the simple case of syncing your work and home computers or sharing with coworkers that is not always a reliable assumption.
It's only a replacement for a centralized service like Dropbox if you have an always-connected peer (a de facto central server).
by sinkasapa on 5/13/14, 12:29 AM
One of my favorite open source tools of this kind is unison. It works great. I set it up to go and I don't even notice it is there. It is quick, seems to have been around for a while and is packaged for most Linux distros. It has a GUI but you don't need it.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
by alyandon on 5/12/14, 6:01 PM
I can't really seem to find this information in the documentation.
Does this support delta/block-level sync for large files (e.g.: does mounting a 100 GB truecrypt container, modifying a file inside the container and unmounting it cause the entire 100 GB container to be uploaded)?
Does it utilize the native OS platform APIs for detecting file modification (e.g. inotify on linux) as opposed to scanning/polling large directories looking for modified date changes?
by frabcus on 5/12/14, 6:26 PM
Fancy being interviewed for
http://redecentralize.org/ ?
If so, email me francis@redecentralize.org! (I couldn't see an email or contact form for you on the syncthing site)
by simbolit on 5/12/14, 6:01 PM
by taterbase on 5/12/14, 7:22 PM
by freework on 5/12/14, 11:02 PM
One thing I've never gotten about these "syncing" apps...
Lets say I install this software on my phone, my desktop, and my work computer. I have 100+ GB free on my work computer and my home desktop, but I only have 16GB on my phone. If I add 20GB worth of movies to my sync folder, its going to fill up my phone.
by JonAtkinson on 5/12/14, 5:58 PM
I just setup Sparkleshare (
http://sparkleshare.org/) this weekend. I wanted something which wasn't Dropbox, and preferably open-source, and while Sparkleshare has a slightly clunky pair mechanism, it works beautifully.
Syncthing looks similar, and LAN sync'ing is a killer feature for those of us in offices with poor bandwidth.
by popey on 5/13/14, 8:11 AM
I've been using Syncthing for some months now and it's working well for my use case of keeping laptop/desktop and home server files in sync. I had one occasion when I lost everything as I'd brought up syncthing on my server without the "sync" directory mounted. It happily deleted all files from my synced laptop as a result. That's now fixed, but it was a buttock clenching moment. Yay backups, and a third machine (desktop) which was suspended and thus out of sync, so still had my data.
Upstream developer is very friendly and attentive & seems happy to discuss new features and use cases.
by sixothree on 5/12/14, 8:48 PM
It appears HN readers are terrible at self-organizing. Threads for articles like this should include by default a top level node for:
"Here's the alternative I use"
"Important question about the technology"
"Pertinent question about the article"
by Wilya on 5/12/14, 6:16 PM
That looks like a promising project in a space which definitely needs improvement. Owncloud and Sparkleshare are okay, but they are far from perfect, and there is large room for improvement.
by r0muald on 5/12/14, 5:54 PM
A better title would be "Syncthing, an open source Dropbox replacement written in Go".
But seriously, it seems promising.
by Karunamon on 5/12/14, 7:27 PM
How good is this at traversing firewalls? AFAIK, Dropbox will do some manner of HTTP trickery to allow syncing when behind overly-restrictive firewalls (so it just goes out the usually-provided web proxy), but the documentation here references forwarding ports + UPNP, so I'm guessing that doesn't apply here?
by zyngaro on 5/12/14, 8:20 PM
"Each node scans for changes every sixty seconds". There isn't any portable way to get notfications about file changes instead of polling? I know about jnotify in Java but well it's in java.
by marcamillion on 5/13/14, 8:15 AM
I have large media files, multiple TBs.
I deal with a constant stream of these and want to have a distributed network - connected via the inet - that allows me to sync the drives in all locations.
i.e. I would like to setup a server in my home office, one in my co-founder's home office and another in my editor's home office.
Whenever my editor runs off a few hundred GB of data to a specific folder or to their drive, I would love for that to be auto-synced to both my server and that of my co-founder.
Will Syncthing allow me to do this easily and will it be appropriate for an application like that?
by aw3c2 on 5/12/14, 6:00 PM
This looks very promising. But the documentation is not good. I have not managed to find a "1 minute" friendly overview of how it works. I mean, what data gets sent how where and why.
by rsync on 5/12/14, 7:26 PM
Here is the original from a year or so ago:
https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_e...
"Then all current commercial services drop off, including SpiderOak, Bittorrent Sync and git-annex. This resulted in a clever combination of EncFS and dvcs-autosync. Because, in this day and age, you cannot trust any "cloud" provider with your unencrypted data."
by doctoboggan on 5/12/14, 8:27 PM
A few months ago I looked into using Syncthing for my decentralized browser, Syncnet[0]. At that time it did not seem ready for primetime. Does anyone have a good feel for its maturity as of late? For example, is there an API? Syncthing looks very promising and I would love to integrate Syncnet with it.
[0]: http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web...
by bankim on 5/13/14, 3:05 AM
by chrisBob on 5/12/14, 6:21 PM
I am very happy with the timemachine backup on my mac, but I have been looking for a good offsite backup solution so that I can trade storage with my family in case something happens to my house. This might finally be the right option. BT Sync seemed ok, but was more than I wanted my parents to try and setup.
by binaryanomaly on 5/12/14, 5:52 PM
Let's hope this becomes what it is promising and reliefs me of dropbox and the likes... ;)
by davidjhall on 5/13/14, 2:14 AM
Does this need to use the web gui? I tried setting this up on a digital ocean server and it spawns off a webserver on 8080 that I can't reach from my machine. Is there a "headless" mode for client-less servers?
Thanks
by ReAzem on 5/13/14, 3:09 AM
I would also like to point out
https://www.syncany.org/Syncany can work with any backend (like AWS S3) and is encrypted.
It is more of a dropbox replacement while sycnthing is a btsync replacement.
by nvk on 5/12/14, 6:12 PM
That's great news, have been looking for a OSS sync app for quite some time.
by interg12 on 5/13/14, 1:14 AM
What's wrong with BitTorrent Sync? The fact that it's a company?
by grey-area on 5/13/14, 7:42 PM
This project's aims seem very similar to the earlier camilstore project, also written in go:
https://camlistore.org
Anyone know how it compares?
by orblivion on 5/12/14, 9:12 PM
Does somebody fund projects like this? Or is it just that the people in charge of them understand something about UI and marketing? Seems like a nice trend, if so.
by desireco42 on 5/12/14, 9:04 PM
Since I installed Bittorrent Sync, my need for such software stopped as it works really well and provides all I need from it.
I couldn't understand quite advantages and why would I replace BTSync, which BTW, works really well already and does all this nice things. Plus works on my Phone and Ipad and Nexus.
To clarify one thing, I have home server which obviously hosts BTSync repos with ample space. Ability to fine-grained share parts of it is invaluable.
by twosheep on 5/12/14, 7:18 PM
So this may be as good a thread as any to ask for assistance:
My small business is looking for a combined file collaboration / file backup service that doesn't cost an excessive amount of money (we're a non-profit on a budget). Is there a good service for this? For example, Dropbox is mainly for sharing files, whereas Carbonite is mostly for backing up your computer. Is there a solution for both?
by akumen on 5/13/14, 2:15 PM
We love to through around the words "alternative" and " replacement" it is neither until it is as easy to use/deploy as X for the average Joe. You know 90% of people out there who would't be able to out the words 'git', 'deploy' and 'heroku' in the right order as their eyes glaze over in confusion.
by Joona on 5/12/14, 9:04 PM
by dead10ck on 5/12/14, 9:04 PM
This looks very promising. And it's written in Go! The only major feature I think it's missing is file versioning.
I am curious, though: what do people use to get their files remotely? And what's the cheapest solution for hosting your own central server? Would a simple AWS instance work fine?
by mark_l_watson on 5/12/14, 9:33 PM
I really like the idea but one thing is stopping me: portability to iOS and Android devices, and mobile apps that work with Dropbox. Dropbox has a first-mover advantage.
This is mostly a problem for people like me who use both Android and iOS devices so alternatives need to support both platforms.
by emsy on 5/13/14, 9:43 AM
Yet another sync app is Pyd.io
The Web UI is super neat, and you can choose between various backends for storage. Pyd.io offers its own sync app which I found to be horribly slow. I'd suggest to use Pyd.io as a frontend and BtSync/Seafile/Syncthing as a backend.
by ertdfgcb on 5/13/14, 1:03 AM
Unrelated, is one of the best open source project landing pages I've ever seen.
by biocoder on 5/13/14, 2:20 PM
by nl on 5/13/14, 2:19 AM
Is there any mobile support?
I use Dropbox pretty frequently to share stuff between mobile devices and desktops. If Syncthing can't do that it isn't as useful.
by haxxorfreak on 5/12/14, 11:55 PM
I don't see a Solaris build on the download page but it's listed next to the download button on the home page, am I just missing something?
by Fede_V on 5/12/14, 8:35 PM
This looks incredibly interesting, and I would very much like to move from Dropbox to something open source. Thanks, will definitely play with it.
by Lucadg on 5/13/14, 5:26 AM
another alternative:
http://www.filement.com/
I don't use it but friends do and are pretty happy with it.
From their home page:
- Combine devices and cloud services into a single interface.
- Transfer data between computers, smartphones, tablets and clouds.
- Manage and use data directly on the device or cloud it is stored.
by jms703 on 5/13/14, 4:57 PM
++ this effort. I'm looking forward to replacing my current BitTorrent Sync (btsync) setup with Syncthing.
by Sir_Cmpwn on 5/12/14, 8:17 PM
I would like to see something like this that does not place trust on the server hosting the files.
by scrrr on 5/13/14, 9:32 AM
Is there a paper / doc explaining, how the synchronisation works in detail?
by chris123 on 5/12/14, 9:55 PM
Can we get a "Bitcoin meets Dropbox meets Airbnb" already? Thks :)
by scragg on 5/13/14, 12:11 AM
I would of liked the name "synctank" better. :)
by hellbreakslose on 5/13/14, 7:48 AM
Cool, I always like it when things are open source!
by downstream1960 on 5/12/14, 11:06 PM
So its basically pirating, but its saves across all platforms?
