OpenSource peer to peer sync - PeerDrive

[coewar]

well the race is on. There is at least one open source project for distributed peer syncing.

http://peerdrive.org/

This project started in 2011.

Not sure it's any good though.

[coewar]

Here is another one: http://flattr.com/t/111192 Flattr. (edit: oops that's not open source)

but this one is: http://www.powerfolder.com/about-us/open-source.html

[coewar]

alright.. last one.. this is just for those paranoid about future of BTSync.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Unison.

[coewar]

ok.. THIS is the last one.

http://sparkleshare.org/

[JimmyTheSaint]

Is there one that plans to support Windows, Synology NAS, and Android?

[pmow]

Sparkleshare doesn't do large files well.

Peerdrive doesn't have downloads, and the others are a joke. Gosh I love BTSync.

[goli]

Sparkleshare has *lots* of drawbacks. I just moved from Sparkleshare to btsync because Sparkleshare is not usable, imho.

• FIle system encoding often creates clumsy file names when the original one contains umlauts. This sometimes results in several versions of the very same file, each one mor iteration through utf8_decode.
  
• Huge repositories often crash either the local process or the git server. I have 8GB of MP3 files, ~4MB each. I simply cannot connect another Windows host to this Sparkleshare drive since the underlying git process always runs into memory limits or stack overflows (that's what the log says).
  
• All nodes always have the complete version history of a repository, which usually requires the disk space twice. My 8GB of MP3 are stored in a 16GB Sparkleshare folder. That's pretty much a showstopper when you try to connect a mobile phone.
  

The idea behind Sparkleshare is really awesom, but the daily business use case doesn't fit. You usually don't need version history back to the very beginning. For the most file types you actually don't need any version history. And the internal mechanism of GIT always taking care of the complete text of binary content of the repository at a whole ("GIT tracks content, not files") makes everything bigger than a certain size really painfull.

And ontop of that: Sparkleshare isn't peer to peer. GIT is, if you do different remotes. But that's not how Sparkleshare works. Sparkleshare only allows for a single remote per repository, which isn't peer to peer but a single central server.

Until now, the current state of btsync fits my need for a synchronization tool way better than Sparkleshare.

Regards,

Stephan.

[Disappointed Cat]

If you ask me, it's borderline insane to use Git for general storage purposes. Git is not meant for "large" binary files. Also it's performance drops drastically over millions of lines commited which is not hard to exceed in this case. Not to mention it's hard to manage old commits - i.e. delete - because it has a strict tree structure. I've never used Sparkleshare and from what I just learned, I never will.

BTSync is rapidly evolving and already proved that it's very capable. Indeed, opensourcing it would be great but I'm happy either way and after the devs introduce an API a lot of possibilities open up.

BTW, FSF is working on something. Link.

[rdebath]

Okay, peerdrive is a distributed filesystem, your data is stored in a peerdrive volume not on the filesystem. This makes it very difficult to port. It's use of the 'Dokan' library is probably an issue as that 'WindowsFUSE' library isn't being updated and updates were apparently stopped because of unsolvable compatibility issues.

Powerfolder appears to be bound to a server in some rather complex way that allows them to limit what's transferred. They also claim only the "CORE" is open source, whatever that means. (NB: I don't like java either, it tends to make things awkward to run)

Unison is pretty good, but it is a scheduled thing not an update on changes and must have exactly the same version of the application at both ends of a pairing. It used to have a problem with large files; but I think that's been solved by having an option to use an external file transfer program (rsync). (Note: Files are transferred between pairs or nodes, but there can be lots of pairs)

Sparkleshare, yup, what he said.

Oh and the FSF one is very, very, new so developers will be playing with pieces but mostly waiting to see how BTSync turns out.

[Guest idef1x]

alright.. last one.. this is just for those paranoid about future of BTSync.

http://www.cis.upenn...cpierce/unison/

Unison.

unison is not realy peer to peer in my opinion. More just a 2 way sync between two machines