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Dev.SN ♥ developers

posted by janrinok on Monday March 24 2014, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly

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?"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:54AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:54AM (#20887) Homepage

    Dropbox is by far the most convenient solution out there: it just works, and is available for Windows/Mac/Linux. It passes the "grandmother test", i.e., even your grandmother could use it.

    For security, I've recently starting using Encfs with Dropbox. You can decide whether you want to encrypt only part, or all of your files - just put the stuff you want to encrypt in a subdirectory (say ".encrypted"), and mount this with encfs. However, this definitely doesn't pass the "grandmother test". Anyhow, here are two good links [howtogeek.com] about the setup [webupd8.org].

    Actually, encryption in general is a problem: it's fine for techies, but Joe Sixpack will forget his password, and will not understand why the local computer shop can't recover his pr0n.

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