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

[Pierce Benjamin C.]

> 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?

Actually, this functionality is pretty close to working -- what it needs is for someone who cares about a particular platform to take it on and polish off a few remaining rough edges.  Moreover, this can be done with minimal OCaml knowledge, as the actual FS monitoring code is written in Python...

    - B


On Feb 21, 2011, at 8:58 AM, Ryan Newton wrote:

> 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
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