A personal Dropbox replacement based on Git

http://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/dvcs-autosync

by gglanzani • 15 years ago

109 35 15 years ago

mayrhofer.eu.org

rcthompson• 15 years ago

I looked through the source, and it doesn't seem to have any conflict resolution. As far as I can tell, it simply executes the push and pull commands without checking their exit codes to see if they succeeded.

pat2man• 15 years ago

Using a git backend for this kind of service is great since it would provide a common synchronization engine for all your files. Thus if I have 3 or 4 of these services pointing at the same folder everything should work.

pronoiac2• 15 years ago

Won't the space taken up by revisions monotonically increase? Deleting files won't free up the space, since the old revision is still tracked.

Dealing with gigabytes of files & revisions isn't git's forte.

rdtsc• 15 years ago

You are right. It might increase very slowly if you actually store a source repository composed of many small files and then only some of them change periodically. But if you store large binary blobs and all of them change often then git won't work that well.

You'd at least want to have the option to blow away some history as you run out of space or become confident that you'll never need it -- can't do that in git without re-writting the whole commit history from scratch and filtering out some commits.

In think in this case there is some confusion between backup and synchronization, both can be thought of as separate and git might not do well for either one in the general case. It might not be as good for backup, because you might want to blow away old snapshots and in case of synchronization. As for general bidirectional synchronization, you'd need some way to plugin in custom merge conflict resolution (can git do that?). For example you might have a policy that whenever you modify a file on the your laptop it should take precendence over the same file modified on your iphone, or some text files can handle merging while others should be replaced based on timestamp, or something like that.

gwern• 15 years ago

> But if you store large binary blobs and all of them change often then git won't work that well.

True, default git won't work well. But you can handle large changing files git-style with a different approach; the bup backup system using git comes to mind (see https://github.com/apenwarr/bup & http://lwn.net/Articles/380983/) where what is stored are chunks of files, where xdelta and other diffs work efficiently.

akent2• 15 years ago

I would have thought the personal replacement for Dropbox is just rsync. I guess it depends if you want / need full history. But personally I never use the history features of Dropbox.

mceachen• 15 years ago

rsync isn't bidirectional (see unison: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), but it can be hacked on to make it store snapshots (see http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/, but it's a full volume snapshot, not a per-file versioned history).

js2• 15 years ago

Unison is a good bi-directional syncing utility: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

davidandgoliath• 15 years ago

Appreciate the reminder re: unison. Just made my desktop <-> laptop syncs. a whole lot easier.

320x200• 15 years ago

Unison is great, I use it as a way to keep several machines in sync for large content (several gigs) using a personal server as hub.

http://gitorious.org/mist

It's not a dropbox replacement, but it does the syncing job nice and simple with nothing else but unison, ssh and a shell script. I will eventually make a daemon using inotify so that it can sync in the background as well.

akent2• 15 years ago

This looks promising: https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync#readme

pronoiac2• 15 years ago

Rsync doesn't work offline. Trying to send updates only would fail for differing timeclocks & deleted files.

hyperbovine• 15 years ago

History will save your ass at some point in the future. I'd bet money on it.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

or just GitHub with private repos. then you can control exactly how and when the synchs across various clients occur. less moving parts too.

leif• 15 years ago

git doesn't really expose a great UI for this model of behavior. This needs a good UI for many things, for example, looking through history and cherry-picking old versions of files to revert to.

Also, it doesn't give you access from public computers the way dropbox does. You'd want a non-bare repository with gitweb or an apache directory listing, at the least.

pyre• 15 years ago

There are a couple of FUSE modules that implement a filesystem based on a bare git repo.

bokchoi• 15 years ago

Joey Hess just blogged[0] about ShareBox[1] which creates a fuse filesystem built on git-annex. I don't know either well enough to comment on them.

[0] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/new_git-annex_use_cases/

[1] https://github.com/chmduquesne/sharebox

joeyh• 15 years ago

The dvcs-autosync author is also looking at making it use git-annex for large files.

kjksf• 15 years ago

This is (yet another) "Dropbox replacement" project publicized in HN that grossly misunderstands what Dropbox is, why it's popular and is not a "replacement" in any meaningful way.

Here are just a few characteristics of Dropbox that this project doesn't have:

* cross-platform (windows, mac, linux)

* an easy to setup GUI client that is possible to setup by people who don't necessarily know how to enable inotify in linux kernel or copy autosync.py to location in $PATH

* won't fall over when a merge conflict happens (and a merge conflict will happen and even I, who uses git daily, would be unable to resolve it)

We are good at extrapolating and making connections but in this case extrapolating from "files, sync" to "my linux-only python script is a replacement of Dropbox" is about as valid as extrapolating from "wheels" to "my home made unicycle is a replacement of Toyota Prius".

palish• 15 years ago

At least he's making something. We should foster an atmosphere of encouragement, even if the idea seems silly. Who knows what it could grow into one day?

You might not have intended to be so mean-spirited. I know I've sounded that way in the past. What helped me was to offer some kind of suggestions for improvement along with whatever criticisms I was dishing out. (Rather than just pointing out all of the flaws.)

damncabbage• 15 years ago

My suggestion for improvement would be:

"Don't advertise your project as a 'Dropbox Replacement' unless you actually are."

wccrawford• 15 years ago

Criticism is a thing that's hard to do right.

If you're too kind, they think you aren't serious or are stupid, and they ignore it.

If you're too mean, people berate you for being mean.

Criticism is extremely valuable to a developer and they should be able to overlook any insults (intended or accidental) and absorb the mean of the criticism.

In this case, the criticism is that the project doesn't work as advertised. It is -not- a 'replacement for Dropbox'. You could probably stretch as far as 'Dropbox-like personal storage system using Git' or some such, but even mentioning Dropbox is iffy, since their whole model is user-friendliness.

wzdd• 15 years ago

These clones demonstrate why Dropbox is such a good idea imo. Good ideas are ones that make people think "that's easy, I could do that in a weekend!" Dropbox is great because it isn't just a really good idea, it's also a fantastic implementation.

Mafana0• 15 years ago

The title alone says much about the simplicity of the product. "Dropbox" is more friendly and much easier to remember than the name of "DVCS-Autosync".

bstar• 15 years ago

What makes dropbox special is that I can access it on my home iMac, my work macbook, my linux netbook, my android phone, my iPad and the web interface when I feel so inclined. On top of that, I select different directories to sync on each machine and often share file between friends and colleagues.

An uber simple interface that supported on every major platform is what makes it so awesome.

shadowsun7• 15 years ago

It's funny - I was reading up on Camlistore yesterday, and realize that what it proposes to do very much resembles Dropbox (and - to a certain degree, Git).

Have you considered making a personal Dropbox replacement using it? I hear Brad Fitzpatrick is writing it as his Dropbox replacement.

(Also: competition is bi-directional - it's interesting to take a look at Camlistore's suggested usecases http://camlistore.org/docs/uses and think that Dropbox can do the same ...)

aeontech3• 15 years ago

What do you think about this is better than AeroFS (http://www.aerofs.com/, previous discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1538731)?

sudonim• 15 years ago

One thing that's better is that it's available now. I can't use aerofs. It's a closed beta.

aeontech3• 15 years ago

I can get you an invite if you like. I got my code shortly after asking for one.

mikesena• 15 years ago

I'd love to get an invite aeontech :D

aeontech3• 15 years ago

send me an email at my username@gmail

rexreed• 15 years ago

What I love about this is that the project uses XMPP for server-to-server communication! Someone had poo-poo'd that idea in a previous post, but I think it has tremendous merit.

darklajid• 15 years ago

Seems like a similar approach as SparkleShare [1], albeit less/not focused on UI (and using XMPP for notifications to update the repository).

1: http://www.sparkleshare.org/

A personal Dropbox replacement based on Git

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