tiwizard Posted May 28, 2013 Report Share Posted May 28, 2013 I have some files synced between my laptop, desktop, and soon will be hooking up my Raspberry Pi as well to have another backup.My question is, at this point, is there a solution (third party or otherwise) that would allow me to setup a networked drive of sorts?For example, I have some ~300 GB of ripped movies attached to a computer hooked up to a ~500mbps network (so, sending and receiving files is *fast*). The problem is, my Macbook Air only has 128 GB of space total-- obviously not enough to sync all of the movies.However, Bitcasa, for example, works as a network drive and doesn't actually store the files on your device with their "infinite drive" feature. They appear in Finder (or Windows Explorer, for Windows users), and the files are transferred over the network and streamed to my laptop when I want them. The files are also cached on my laptop, up to a limit.Also, another use case is if I want to "loan" my collection of movies to a friend. I could send them a read-only (and even temporary) secret and let them stream from my collection.It'd be great to have a P2P/self hosted alternative to Bitcasa's networked "infinite drive" features, and BT Sync seems like it'd be a great app for this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnmarshall4 Posted May 29, 2013 Report Share Posted May 29, 2013 I don't really see Bt Sync going down the 'cached' network drive route like Bitcasa. (My opinion though). I think what we will get is a selective sync solution. At least that is what I've been asking for. That way you can setup a share on your smaller Macbook, and selectively choose only part of the fileset to sync. The granularity would probably be at the folder level like Dropbox. I'm really waiting for this.Who know though, with a public API someone could write a cached drive type solution, that would be cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dj.Bea Posted May 30, 2013 Report Share Posted May 30, 2013 I'm also waiting for same feature: BT Sync Acting as a "Network" Drive (with local cache).This is for notebook, because we can't have lot's of drive in notebook, and with SSD, there is less space, i don't know bitcasa, but Wuala as this feature. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rdebath Posted May 31, 2013 Report Share Posted May 31, 2013 This probably won't happen because it works in a completely different way to BTSyncBTSync doesn't provide a fake filesystem, if BTSync stops or is even uninstalled the directory it was monitoring remains unchanged. BTSync is designed to be a simple reliable tool to do this simple (to state) job..."Make this directory have the same contents as every other directory in the world labelled with the same key."A fully distributed filesystem as you're requesting is a very different animal and many, many times more complex.The closest you're likely to get to this is to use a network filesystem to a local NAS device then install BTSync on the NASs to keep the remote copies intact. You use-case probably doesn't need a caching filesystem as you're doing a slow linear read of a large random chunk. This usage pattern will probably need to free up space in your cache before it ever gets reused.Note: The pattern "The Client connects to a local node for the distributed file system server" is also common for distributed filesystems because it helps reduce the complexity and improve the performance when the file servers guess wrongly about where to store the data.PS: Just to illustrate: I wouldn't be worried about making a clone of BTSync, given a reasonable motivation, But a distributed filesystem ... nope there has to be an easier way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
affinity Posted May 31, 2013 Report Share Posted May 31, 2013 I have some files synced between my laptop, desktop, and soon will be hooking up my Raspberry Pi as well to have another backup.Don't consider BTSync as a backup tool, that it is not. In some respects it can be though..... it is handy that deleted files go to a deleted folder -- but that isn't perfect either; what happens if the same file is repeatedly added and deleted? You may end up with bad files only. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaninhullet Posted January 12, 2014 Report Share Posted January 12, 2014 Won't the sync on demand feature currently available on iOS and Android achieve this nicely? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted January 12, 2014 Report Share Posted January 12, 2014 Won't the sync on demand feature currently available on iOS and Android achieve this nicely? Yes, but this thread is 8 months old!! At the time it was started, the mobile apps hadn't been released!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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