[Unison-hackers] How do people feel about DropBox?

[Jason Axelson]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 4:02 AM, Benjamin Pierce <bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> I've been hearing some good things about DropBox too.  I'd love to
> know more about people's experiences with it, especially compared to
> Unison.
>
> Two things Unison is pretty good at are (1) failing safely when things
> go wrong and (2) getting the details of cross-platform synchronization
> right.  I doubt if I'll personally want switch to anything that
> doesn't do at least as good a job on both counts, so comments on these
> aspects of DropBox would be particularly interesting.

I've been using unison for a few months to synchronize files that I
work with daily (homework and such), I've been using it only on Linux
so far. It is currently about 150MB of data so I can't say anything
about large datasets (I am using unison for 4GB of longer-term data).
It works very well for what I use it for. I save a file while working
and see it upload it to the server within seconds with a nice safe
reassuring green checkmark on the systray. Also when you start it up
it tells you how many files were synchronized.

In the error handling department, I am not sure what it does if you
make two separate changes to documents while offline. But if you have
an error like a file that is owned by root it'll just continually try
to transfer it so you have to check what the problem is and it will
tell you.

Installation and setup was drop-dead simple. Part of the reason for
this is because it forces a (mostly) centralized server model on you
(I believe it does some checking for LAN dropbox clients to speed up
synchronization). Of course thing brings me to my main complaint with
dropbox, the data is stored on their own server which means I have
less control over it and have a storage limit.

I would really like to see unison become more like dropbox by
synchronizing in real time rather than batch jobs as it currently does
and I think Benjamin said recently that this wouldn't be *too* much
work to accomplish.

Jason