Test Idea:nested shares


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I seem to have found the best way to implement it. Make every folder an individual share. That would enable the ability to attach shares to other shares and allow access to one folder without loosing all the bandwith from the cloud.

 

A user that gets the key to a parent folder doesn't have to see or interact with the shares bellow it, the program could handle it seemlessly. But when someone wants to share a sub-folder they should be able to extract the secret for that share and then send it along. For huge libraries of files this would be extremly usefull. I could myself maintain one huge share (everything on my NAS), ensure there is several nodes seeding using the encrypted read-only secret, and still be able to share everything without having to reupload anything. This would give me my own personal cloud.

For management attaching one share to another would be extremly simple. I could setup a share for my grandmother, and then attach shares for whatever she needs (and still have all the seeding that my main parent share would have). I guess there would be some issues with read-only, read-write and encrypted read-only shares, but I imagine that could be cleverly solved somehow. I could then give everyone that is willing to give me storage just one encrypted read-only secret, and then attach the shares I want them to store and seed. It would also enable me to setup nodes that need little or no maintenance, I just give them one encrypted read-only secret and attach and detatch shares as I go along.

I feel this would be the optimal way to do this, implementing the features can't be that complicated, all you need is some metadata for each kind of share. When someone downloads a share, it also downloads the shares for all the subfolders, and report that to the tracker. So the tracker would see each folder as a separate share, but the user would just see and interact with one, until the person needs to share a folder within the share they see, then they should be able to obtain the existing secret(s) and send those. For a buisness application this also seems like a very usefull feature for enabling sharing between different people and groups, while maintaing centralized mirrors. Attach the encrypted read-only keys to the share the central server has, and it will maintain an encrypted copy safley stored and backed up.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A simple workaround I found if you are using a server / nas on Linux is to mount your sub directory in another directory somewhere using mount ( A symlink doesn't work ):

 

Say that you have your whole shared folder: /Projects and you want to share only /Projects/SubProject

Create a new folder somewhere else: /Shares/SubProject and you should be able to mount the original SubProject folder this way:

mount -o bind /Projects/SubProject /Shares/SubProject

Then you can share it as you wish using /Shares/SubProject! It's also possible to add an entry to /etc/fstab so that it's getting mounted at server startup.

 

I didn't tried but I suspect it's possible to do the same on Windows ( http://superuser.com/questions/77872/how-to-mount-ntfs-folder-in-another-ntfs-folder )

 

KS

Edited by Kel Solaar
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What do you mean by you can't cross seed? It just works like any regular folder.

 

If I share a folder with you and my mother, then you will upload to my mother, and my mother will upload to you. If I create to separate shares, and share one with you and one with my mother, I will have to upload it to both, and be online until both finishes. In the first scenario using BTSync makes sense, in the second it is a waste of cpu-cycles as a webserver or sftp server would do the same job with far less overhead. Having the downloaders seed to eachother is paramount for this software to have any purpose. cpu-cycles and I/O Is abundant in home systems, but upload bandwidth isn't.

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I see what you mean and it's something I took in consideration actually. Now that being said, having an efficiency issue at doing something is a whole lot different that not being able to do it at all ( Which you were implying in your previous post, hence my question ). You are maybe also assuming that I'm sharing data over the net, but it's not the case, I'm doing that over a local network with high bandwith, and didn't noticed any particular slow downs or performances issues on my server.

 

Thanks for your input though :)

 

KS

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have managed to get teh floowing Simple Nested scenario to work:

 

MY DOCUMENTS syncs from machine 1 to machine 2

MY DOCUMENTS/QUICKBOOKS syncs from machine 1 to machine 3

 

So, MY DOCUMENTS/QUICKBOOKS *also* syncs from machine 1 to machine 2 because its inside the larger sync group of MY DOCUMENTS.

 

I didn't read thru the entire thread, so I hope this info is relevant.

I have sub-synced just one folder of a larger synced folder, to another computer - that's pretty cool.

 

MR

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  • 7 months later...

Only thing you can do is create a share inside an already shared folder. This works well for me since several weeks.

 

An option for nested shares is still missing in desktop versions. Though Android has a function for "partial sync".

 

+1 from me for a real nested share support

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Sorry, of course this is a real nested share :D. Mixed this thing with selective sync. I think the selective sync idea already "includes" the nested share thing, that's why I mixed those up.

 

 

If I have only ONE secret for my personal folder I could share this one with all my devices and select which of the subfolders I need on a certain device. That way I wouldn't need an extra "nested share".

 

Using the current way of creating nested shares will produce a new secret for every shared folder. If I have a lot of sub folders (music, movies, documents, etc.) I'll have to create a secret for every single subfolder and share these secrets to every device. If a new folder is added, I'll have to create a new secret and share it with every device again and so on.

 

I don't know if this would be important for you (or if you need nested shares for something else), but for me it would be a great thing.

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Hmmm, to me it seems selective sync should be much easier than nested share - actually it's already the way how it's implemented on mobile devices. On my phone, I can select for a folder to download all the files in it, it never downloads the whole share. So I don't see how this couldn't be easily implemented.

 

On the other hand, nested share probably need to be aware of each other. So if I change something in a nested share, it doesn't get synced twice - I assume that is now taken care of?

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The current selective sync feature on Android phones is not exactly what I'm looking for.

 

If I select a subfolder to be synced (no auto-sync selected), only those files which exist at this time are synced. Folders & files which are added later by any of the peers won't get synced until I open the app and select "sync" again. Also it isn't possible to deselect a folder or file at a later time. So if I change my mind and don't want that folder/file  to be synced any longer I have no possibility to uncheck these items.

 

I'll post this ideas in the selective sync feature request thread also.

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  • 6 months later...

So this is the only thread about the error I'm receiving:

"This folder cannot be added to Sync. It contains a folder that is already syncing."

 

I'm currently sharing a movie folder on an external drive (path on Ubuntu /media/2TBMedia/Movies), the photos folder from my Android device (as /home/ahow628/BTShared/DCIM), and nothing else.

 

I want to add the folder /home/ahow628/Downloads but I get the above error. Clearly I don't have any folder below that shared. Is the fact that both have /home/ahow628 in them causing issues or what?

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