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digitalderbs writes:
"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Monday March 24 2014, @10:18PM
I will describe my setup as it may be slightly different from other people's due to different obejctives. I used to have a freebsd box with a 1TB mirror using geom about 3 years ago. My windows pc connected to it via a samba share for my personal docs. My main issue was that i did not keep old versions of docs and being an ex developer, i was used to working with code repositories. Then i bought a second cheap laptop for travel/teaching etc. i soon started to have problems remembering where i modified what etc. along with sync issues with tools such as robocopy for syncing between the win and bsd machines etc.
In the end, i bought a few hardware pieces, built a new bsd box running a mirror using zfs thanks to the new kernel and while i still have samba for music etc. my docs are on a git repo. I know, i know, it is not very good for merging excel, word etc files. But i find it a lot faster than smb for syncing and a lot more in line with my habits. In the morning, i do a pull from the repo and when i am done i do a push, much like i did back when i coded all the time. I also like the idea that at all times i have at least 3 machines which are almost if not all up to date :)
It has been a learning curve but i did want to learn it. I have a dropbox too but i only use it to upload slides before i go teach and to share stuff with students. My personal docs are not accessible remotely and to me that is perfect that way. As an added bonus i reconverted the old bsd box as a backup server running rsync to pull from the new bsd server :).
I did not know about unison though, it may have been useful back when i did my research!
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:30AM
I have created a git repository in my home directory and uploaded to github. It doesn't store my personal files - I need those when I dual boot into Windows, so I store them in Dropbox (and 3 different usb hard disks - I have been burned once). But the dotrc files are all in github. There are different branches for office laptop, home desktop, cygwin etc. Since I am in habit of trying out different distros, this setup is pretty much perfect for me :)