[Unison-hackers] A rant about problems with dropbox -- thank you Unison!

[Ryan Newton]

Thank you unison for *correctness*.

We had a thread discussing dropbox back in October.  I was cautiously
optimistic then but now am more jaded after the abysmal way they
handle symlinks:
    http://parfunk.blogspot.com/2011/02/dropbox-semantics-oh-that-there-were.html

Ironically, I end up recommending periodic unison to get the symlinks
right and then dropbox for day to day synchronization!  (Not a
pleasant solution.)  It's exactly as Benjamin Pierce says in the
message below -- unison fails safely and gets cross-platform right.
I've seen dropbox break both these rules so far.

Ranting about the low quality of commercial synchronization solutions
has become a bit of a hobby.  For the sake of confirmation bias I
would love to hear other people's bad stories about commercial
synchronization solutions ;-) -- e.g. apple's iSync both lost my data
and got into a failure mode exhibiting exponential duplication.  It
seems as though many companies treat synchronization as just another
programming task and not worthy of deeper thought.

BUT, Dropbox in particular still has a lot of draw -- super easy
setup, cloud storage, and the wonderful file-browser-as-GUI
methodology.

I'm convinced that Unison could be the kernel of a great solution
here.  But in the past its been too much work for anyone to get
excited about doing cross-platform inotify-style file system
monitoring in particular.  Are there other open source projects from
which this functionality could be borrowed?  iFolder?

-Ryan

P.S. Also, if anyone were interested the nautilus-plugin for dropbox
is open-source and could be a starting point for file-browser
integration.

P.P.S. I don't know about cloud storage.  I assume that S3 and google
storage use APIs that would make it difficult to ever unison-to-cloud
directly.  (Without maybe running an EC2 instance with a unison server
or something.)


On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 10:02 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.
>
>    - Benjamin