rstarkov
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Posts posted by rstarkov
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I'd like this feature to be brought back too. My install is system-wide and runs as a service, and it's pretty silly to have it in a specific user's profile for a system-wide install.
Of course the real underlying issue is that the BTSync team stubbornly refuse to support running BTSync as a service.
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Fantastic, thank you!
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When I have a folder with "Sync all" disabled, and drill down into the tree, I sometimes want to sync the entire folder I currently have open.
The "..." menu in top right sounds like the logical place to check, but that only has "Filter by". Could you please add "Sync this folder" to it? It should have the same effect as going up a level, selecting the folder and selecting "Sync" that way.
(edited to remove the part I've since figured out how to do properly)
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Got this too out of the blue. I don't run any task killers and the phone was just sitting doing nothing. It synced a few files yesterday night fine, today it says "Database error". I haven't even touched it since the last time it worked. Exiting and restarting sync doesn't help.
Is there an official way to recover from this?
Force closing shouldn't damage the database anyway. Don't you use sqlite transactions for this kind of thing?
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TL;DR: if there are folders you'd rather not be syncable from your phone in case you lose it, create a separate identity for your phone, instead of linking it. If you don't have such folders then this post is of no interest to you.
I love the idea of syncing files to the phone. But the 2.0 model is such that every linked device has the ability to pull every folder I have in my folder list. This is great for convenience, but sucks for security, the classic trade-off.
The problem is that I have a dozen folders of varying level of sensitivity. Some contain accounting stuff for my company and personal notes. Some contain photos. There's an e-book folder and a folder with my phone's Titanium backups. Plus a bunch more. I only really want the phone to have access to the e-books and Titanium backup folders. But by default, my phone is still authorized to pull the company accounting files and photo archives and everything else, even though I don't want my phone to have access to these (they are there to be synced to my laptop and another desktop).
The official procedure for a lost phone is this. It basically tells you to remove every folder and re-add to all the other devices. A major pain if you have tons of folders and devices.
Suggestion
Here's an easy work-around that can be used today. Instead of linking your phone to your main identity, create a new identity for it. Then make the trusted home desktop the owner of the folder, and share it with the phone in "Read & Write" mode.
That's it! This gains you two things: first, your phone can no longer sync every folder available to you, but only those folders which you specifically shared with your phone. Second, if you lose your phone, you simply Disconnect that peer (and never use that phone's identity again). That's it!
If you link the phone to your main identity then you can't disconnect it; that's just how this security model works. But if the phone uses a separate identity, you don't even have to recreate those folders that were shared with the phone. Disconnecting the peer is sufficient (or so I believe).
There's only one problem with this: if you paid for BTSync then only your main identity has the extra features. But so far this works fine for me; the phone is unlikely to exceed 10 shared folders, and I only need the (pay-for) "change peer access rights" feature on the main identity anyway.
There's got to be a better way?
I'm not sure. I think there's a good reason for why you basically have to recreate all your folders on a new identity if you lose your phone. A linked device has your identity's private key (or so I think), and there's no fix for "my private key has been stolen" other than "stop using it and create a new one".
One approach might be to derive a sub-identity from my main identity, so that it's still me, but with limited access rights. But this sounds pretty complicated, both in terms of code and also from the user's perspective. So... I'm not holding my breath for any better approaches than what I've described above.
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Hah, typical! The idea is to increase security by disallowing X, but surprise, people actually wanted to do X, so now they root and open up the SD card to every application, and the net result is that overall security is worse than before.
It would be nice if BTSync asked for root to write to SD card.
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So I bought a license for my own use, and I got several people to install the free BTSync.
Now they're all bugging me about an expired trial version, and one person required me to log in remotely because she is elderly and has not the slightest clue about what her computer is wanting her to do.
Can we please have some obvious controls to start in free mode from day 1? The hack described here doesn't help, as I need this as a permanent thing, not just for some temporary testing.
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OK, thanks! I hope it's a high priority because without a real "run as a service" mode, I have little choice but to use NSSM + the web UI... :/
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Hm. Disabled AdBlock in Firefox: same results. Opened in Chrome: same results. Opened in IE: same results.
It works correctly if I open it in the application without using Web UI though. So as far as I can tell, it just doesn't show those options through the Web UI?
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And if I don't?
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Some way to group folders would go a long way, especially if I could collapse the groups. You could just put the important folders into an "Important!" group and keep it collapsed.
I'd actually be happy to have even the most crude arrangement: if they let me give my sync folders labels, instead of showing the actual folder name, then I could just prefix the important ones so that at least they're all in one place when sorted by name.
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I've purchased a Pro license. I've definitely seen the option to enable selective sync somewhere, the problem is I cannot see it anywhere anymore. I'm on 2.0.93.
There used to be three choices in My Devices just half an hour ago, "Disconnected", "Connected" and "Synced". Now there are just two. When I try to connect a folder, it just asks where to sync to, and doesn't offer me to sync selectively.
Under "Licenses..." it lists my license correctly. Any ideas?
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Your steps do not account for the case of when I don't have a tray icon because I'm running as a service...
The overall experience is rather annoying:
1. There are 500 files left to sync
2. The peers see each other as online
3. And yet nothing's happening.
If you want to see what's happening, whip out the debug log. Bah! Honestly, a techie error message displayed right next to the folder is a gazillion times better than sitting idle doing nothing! At least I can google that without trying to figure out how to enable the log file or how to read it.
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It's all in the title, really. I have a folder that says "4 files locked" but all the peers are offline, so I can't look at which files they are. On further thought it's clear that when all peers are offline this state is altogether meaningless.
P.S. the forum appears to be overriding my title capitalization, so... well, don't blame it on me
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What I don't get is why they offer discounts to volume purchasers. Surely a company is MORE capable of paying $40 per user than an independent user paying for his own license... yet THEY are the ones who get a discount.
Volume discounts make sense when there is bulk shipment or a very large cost of selling. But when applied to software, I think most of the time it's a discount given to those most able to pay you lots of money.
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The change from "Enter a key or link" to "Enter a key" makes no sense. A link is still accepted, but a user who finds that he can't get the normal link clicking to work is sure to be lost. As was my friend: I watched him click "I already have 1. 4" many times and Chrome simply did nothing.
I told him to try to paste it into "I have a key", but I would never have thought to do that if I hadn't seen it phrased properly in 1.4.106! Really weird to see this given that it's *keys* that are sort of phased out, not links.
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Awesome, thanks @RomanZ!
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Suppose I sync photos with friends named Jack and Bob. They go to folders C:\Photos\Jack and C:\Photos\Bob. I also sync documents with Bob, these go to C:\Documents\From Bob. My list of folders looks like this:
– Jack
– Bob
– From Bob
That's awful. Please let me modify this to:
– Photos from Jack
– Photos from Bob
– Documents from Bob
without having to sync them to e.g. C:\Photos\Photos from Jack.
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Judging by the progress on the Windows service feature, you might be right Moe...
Remember this request next time you forget to un-pause your sync though, you might change your mind
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Most of the time when I pause something, it's temporary. I don't leave things paused forever.
Half the time when I pause something, I forget to unpause it and only notice a few days later when something isn't syncing / backing up.
Please could you allow me to pause sync for a specific time (1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours) after which it un-pauses automatically? This applies equally to the overall pause and to the selective pause (which is a great addition and is definitely appreciated!)
Here's how CrashPlan does it, and boy does it make a huge difference!
(there's no "indefinitely" there because CrashPlan is for backups and I guess they decided you never want to pause your backups indefinitely)
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Pretty please, a very fast scheme like LZO or LZ4 adds extremely little overhead, so little in fact that one can compress every chunk to be transferred, see if it grew, and if so send it out uncompressed.
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Please don't price out non-business users who need this "business" feature...
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Ah cool, didn't realise there was still a way to paste a key directly. They sure did a good job of hiding it, because I looked and I couldn't find it.
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The one difficulty with this is that if you delete a bunch of files on the "master" copy while the sneakernet flash disk is still on its way to the destination, these files will show up again. This is because there is no way to run the initial sync in any mode other than "merge".
Another scenario where specifying one copy as a master would help: you wipe your laptop's software and reinstall everything. Your data partition is still there, with a copy of the synced folders that is now out of date. You cannot realistically just install BTSync and add that folder, because again, this will obliterate deletions that happened in the meantime. The best option is to wipe and start from scratch, unless you know the two to definitely be in sync.
Here's a suggestion I've made about this a long time ago: http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/16462-re-sync-previously-synced-folders/?p=42364
Sync remaining files in a "selective sync" subtree
in Feature Requests
Posted
I've been using selective sync quite a bit and I've found a really puzzling shortcoming that has proved very difficult to work around.
Suppose I have selective sync enabled for MyAdvancedFolder. Inside it I have several dozen subdirectories, one of which is named FooSubfolder.
Scenario #1: I start by syncing a bunch of specific files and subdirectories manually and individually, most of them from FooSubfolder. Some time later I realise I should just sync the entire FooSubfolder from MyAdvancedFolder. But I can't: the "Sync" link is gone because I've synced something from inside it.
My two options are: a) go inside MyAdvancedFolder and comb through every subfolder, clicking "Sync" several hundred times. b) remove the entire FooSubfolder from this device, and then sync it wholesale, thus re-syncing those files I already have. Incidentally, option b) is not viable if I have made some local changes inside MyAdvancedFolder that are still uploading.
Scenario #2: I sync FooSubfolder wholesale. Time goes on and new files are added on the remote device under FooSubfolder. They won't appear on my device because I have selective sync enabled. How do I ever get them? My options are the same as before: a) comb through FooSubfolder, looking for additions (entirely impractical due to the amount of stuff in this subfolder), b) remove entire subfolder from current device and re-sync (which is even dumber for this scenario than it was for scenario #1).
Suggestion: don't hide the "Sync" link on FooSubfolder just because I've synced some of the files inside it. Leave it there, and make it sync whatever isn't synced yet. Otherwise selective sync is completely impractical for every use case I have for it.