Is Resilio Sync dead?

[SirKronos]

I've noticed that Resilio Sync staff have not responded to any forums posts for many months. And I've noticed that Sync is not working reliably any more on macOS Mojave, possibly because of recent security hardening by Apple.

Does anyone know if development has stopped on Sync? It certainly seems like they have no support staff.

[jdrch]

I don't think so, I've had staff respond to a support ticket as recently as June 26. They might just have scaled back their forum support.

There's a post from May on the blog too.

If you're having difficulties, file a support ticket.

But yeah it does seem like development has slowed a bit. I don't think there's been a new build since January, but everything's working just fine for me on Raspbian, Debian, Android, Windows 10, and BSD, so 🤷‍♂️

[David.P]

Oh shit.

Already trying out the (amazing) Synctrayzor in parallel, and after reading the above thinking about moving over there with all my stuff

[jdrch]

OK, everybody calm down a bit.

1st of all, it's a bit ... disingenuous to call a project that had a version release within the past calendar year, a blog post within the last 3 months, and responds to support tickets "dead" just because user forum (i.e. not actual support ticket) staff appear to have gone AWOL. OpenVPN has approximately the same forum situation and I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would call it dead.

As for Synctrazor/Syncthing, if it works better for you, by all means use it. I tried it and came back to Resilio because:

1. Syncthing doesn't have anywhere near the platform support Resilio Sync does. For example, there are no official packages for RPM-based distros, and nothing for BSD or Raspberry Pi or arm(hf or 64) or iOS, all of which Resilio Sync supports. I run Windows 10, BSD, Raspbian on an RPi, Android, and Debian so I need Sync's platform support
2. Syncthing's Windows service functionality (a critical feature for me) is hacky at best
3. Syncthing requires each peers for each folder to be manually connected to each other. This means Syncthing's setup overhead doesn't scale well as the number of devices you use grows. Right now I have 10 peers (devices.) If I were to switch to Syncthing, I'd have to manually connect each of those peers to each other per folder. So for 3 folders I'd be looking at 27 manual connections per peer to start and easily nearly 100 manual connections just to get set up, which is ridiculous
4. Syncthing's Android performance is terrible
5. Syncthing's file/folder change detection is slower, more CPU intensive, and inefficient compared to Resilio Sync's
6. Last time I checked, Syncthing had problems syncing to microSD cards on Android

The worst part of all of the above is every time I talk with someone even tangentially associated with the project, it doesn't seem as if they 1) view any of the above as problematic 2) have any intention of fixing or addressing them.

All of the aforesaid combined make Syncthing a non-starter for me.

Sync isn't dead. If you have an issue, file a support ticket; you'll get a response.

[David.P]

Thank you JD. That calms me down a bit. Also thanks for your comparison between the two synchronization solutions. Using Syncthing at the moment only because it is portable and can be "installed" and run without admin rights (i.e. at work).

[jdrch]

4 minutes ago, David.P said:

Thank you JD. That calms me down a bit. Also thanks for your comparison between the two synchronization solutions. Using Syncthing at the moment only because it is portable and can be "installed" and run without admin rights (i.e. at work).

You're welcome!

I hadn't considered the portable use case because I prefer my sync backends to run as a service (which makes portability impossible.) The advantage of services (in Windows) is they run as long as the computer is on, regardless of who's logged in. Ergo, I can be sure all my (Windows) peers sync as long as they're powered on and have a network connection.

I can certainly see the need for portability on a work machine ... last time I had that need I used the built-in OneDrive client until IT shut that down.

[eltopo]

Resilio Sync for Linux is definitely portable, you don't need root/sudo to run rsl, normal user can use crontab -e (as normal user) to start it with custom config.

Not sure if it works in Windows 10's WSL, you might want to give it a try.

[ivo.welch@gmail.com]

 

purchased home pro version, too, and send a support request 3 weeks ago (auto acknowledgment).  have not heard back, either.

 

[SirKronos]

That's definitely worrisome. To wait three weeks for a support response on a purchased product is unacceptable. Not an encouraging sign at all.

[ivo.welch@gmail.com]

 

I just tried to send a request via the built-in support system feature on the settings page.  it collects the logs for a while, and then dies with "Failed to send feedback".

sorry, but resilio does look dead to me.

 

[jdrch]

3 hours ago, ivo.welch@gmail.com said:

 

purchased home pro version, too, and send a support request 3 weeks ago (auto acknowledgment).  have not heard back, either.

 

But your payment cleared? Hmmm maybe they're going through reorganization or something because the LinkedIn and FB pages are still posting and they just advertised for a job in SF.

LinkedIn still lists 31 employees.

[iswrong]

Another possibility is that they are refocusing on enterprise-only (Connect). At any rate, this topic is two weeks old, if they'd wanted to end the worries, they would have replied to this topic by now.

[jdrch]

6 hours ago, iswrong said:

Another possibility is that they are refocusing on enterprise-only (Connect). At any rate, this topic is two weeks old, if they'd wanted to end the worries, they would have replied to this topic by now.

1. Employees have never replied on here, AFAIK. Only forum staff ever have
2. The company has almost never been directly reachable. There's no contact page and if you look their location up in the phonebook no one answers (I tried this back in 2013 or 2014)

To me the most troubling thing is tickets not being responded to for paying customers and what appears to be broken macOS functionality. But longtime users might recall the stretch in 2014 or thereabout during which Sync was basically completely broken. It was during the transition to the Web GUI, nothing worked reliably for a while, and the company in general was pretty unresponsive about it. By 2015 it was fixed and things have been mostly smooth since.

But for now, I don't have any better options (see above for explanation), I'm in my 6th year of use, and my license is already paid for, so I'm keeping the faith 🤷‍♂️

[iswrong]

3 hours ago, jdrch said:

1. Employees have never replied on here, AFAIK. Only forum staff ever have
2. The company has almost never been directly reachable. There's no contact page and if you look their location up in the phonebook no one answers (I tried this back in 2013 or 2014)

 

This is false. Staff like RomanZ used to be active on the forums.

I am still sure that Resilio is fine, even if they had cashflow problems, the technology is pretty valuable, so it is likely that they could be acquired if needed. But I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer-level desktop client is deprioritized. The desktop client ha[sd] a hard-core following, but I bet that a large chunk has always used free sync. Over time, they have segmented their product offering and it is likely that they saw a large majority of income coming from large(r) business users.

Of course, this is conjecture like any other post.

 

Quote

But for now, I don't have any better options (see above for explanation), I'm in my 6th year of use, and my license is already paid for, so I'm keeping the faith

Agreed!

[jdrch]

12 minutes ago, iswrong said:

 

This is false. Staff like RomanZ used to be active on the forums.

I am still sure that Resilio is fine, even if they had cashflow problems, the technology is pretty valuable, so it is likely that they could be acquired if needed. But I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer-level desktop client is deprioritized. The desktop client ha[sd] a hard-core following, but I bet that a large chunk has always used free sync. Over time, they have segmented their product offering and it is likely that they saw a large majority of income coming from large(r) business users.

Of course, this is conjecture like any other post.

 

Agreed!

RomanZ was an actual employee? I always thought the forum folks were just mods with insider connections (such as the ability to view tickets.) Never got the impression they were internal employees. My bad.

[ivo.welch@gmail.com]

 

I sent a short support inquiry, just asking "are you still answering this support request email?" about a week ago.  (I may even have written "is resilio dead?")  I suggest you do the same to confirm the obvious.

 

[David.P]

So did I and received no reply.

So, yes, Resilio Sync is dead.

Or heavily restructuring

[SirKronos]

1 hour ago, David.P said:

So did I and received no reply.

So, yes, Resilio Sync is dead.

Or heavily restructuring

So it looks like we should assume that they laid off most, if not all, of their support staff. I wonder if they did the same with the programmers.

[Miyo]

That's bad news.

Since the services and relay servers are still working, what's the worst case scenario here?

[drego85]

🙄 fingers crossed!

[jdrch]

5 hours ago, SirKronos said:

laid off most, if not all, of their support staff

... they have 31 employees listed on LinkedIn, including developers. I'm not sure what's going on, either, but if we assume whatever has resulted in the current situation started when forum mods stopped posting here months ago, then it's reasonable to assume all the developers should have been gone by now. They aren't.

4 hours ago, Miyo said:

Since the services and relay servers are still working, what's the worst case scenario here? 

Well, I just noticed a "Quote selection" feature and the ability to move quotes on the forum that I haven't seen previously, so it looks like maintenance is still being done.

The worst case scenario would be Pro and above licenses suddenly failing to validate, thereby crippling the product overnight (even if technically it's still functional.) Personally I'd have no choice but to move to SyncThing 🤮🤮🤮 at that point. I kinda doubt that happens without warning, though.

If it actually is abandoned but the licenses keep working; then it'll just keep working until underlying OS changes prevent it from doing so. For example, if they don't update the app to support Scoped Storage (mandatory in Android R) then it'll definitely stop working on Android. In fact, if you use Android I'd call Scoped Storage the biggest threat to P2P workflows. Bigger than Resilio Sync going under.

[drego85]

News from Twitter:

 

[SirKronos]

2 minutes ago, drego85 said:

News from Twitter:

 

So that's good news to a certain extent. But they don't seem to be responding to support tickets from Resilio Pro/Home customers which isn't cool.

[jdrch]

I mean, of course. As I said in my 2nd reply on this thread, it's super weird to call a project with a software release within the last calendar year dead without an official announcement. But some folks enjoy panicking 😛 🤷‍♂️

[jdrch]

1 minute ago, SirKronos said:

So that's good news to a certain extent. But they don't seem to be responding to support tickets from Resilio Pro/Home customers which isn't cool.

The forum literally got updated since this thread started.

That said, I don't think they have a lot of manpower. Headcount is pretty small for a product that effectively competes with Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and has far wider platform support.

I think the reason I'm not too worried is my Pro license is lifetime free because I helped beta test during the app -> service transition back in the day. If I were a paying customer hell yeah I'd be mad at service tickets not being replied to. So I can certainly see where some of you are coming from.