Castor Posted January 27, 2013 Report Share Posted January 27, 2013 Does SyncApp upload the entire file or only parts of file that are modified? I have a 11 MB zip file that got uploaded entirely when I made a change in one of the spreadsheet file in the zip.BTW, the zip file i used is password protected and has the extension .zipx. It has only .xlsx file in it which was also password protected. The xlsx file has many sheets. I made the change in one of the sheet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 27, 2013 Report Share Posted January 27, 2013 Sync doesn't support diff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Castor Posted January 27, 2013 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2013 Well, then I guess, you may consider adding this feature in the future versions. I believe Dropbox already does this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 27, 2013 Report Share Posted January 27, 2013 Dropbox does that, for couple of reasons: it saves them money on harddrive space and network traffic. Which actually makes perfect sense. In case of Sync, it might be faster to just transfer the file, rather than calculate difference and then apply it to the file. Having in mind that all files are binary nowadays, this is not as effective as difference for big text files. Anyway we have this in mind, however importance of this feature is questionable, of course if leave aside marketing noise about this feature. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MicEdwards Posted January 28, 2013 Report Share Posted January 28, 2013 Also ... if the file is encrypted, it will not matter if you have diff, because encryption often (usually?) modifies the whole file.So, yes, rsync and Dropbox might do this by chunking for normal binary or text files, but for encrypted ones it doesn't really help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tester007 Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 It's very important feature.Sync should re-check the file if it was modified and resync only modified pieces of the file, no need to resync entire 4 GB file if only 1 byte was changed in it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mosch Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 What kind of files do you guys want to sync between your computers? I think sharing 4 GB files is not very common. Most people share documents up to a couple of hundreds of kB, maybe some pictures with some mB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
highend Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 You really think, this is a questionable feature? oODelta copying (or syncing) saves bandwith & time and both things are very valuable things (at least in most countries where your upstream is rather limited). I've used rsync for my cloud backups so far (under Windows *urgs*) just because it's so efficient because of it's delta copying feature... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 Don't get me wrong, we do understand importance of the diff and its advantages. And actually Sync support delta copying if file size stays the same.However implementing rsync like diff in distributed environment without dedicated server, is kind of complex task. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tester007 Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 Sync support delta copying if file size stays the sameChanged 1 byte in 200 MB file and Sync started sending the whole file. Maybe piece size is more than 4 MB or Sync couldn't determine which part of the file changed? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 This is why the software is in pre-alpha, not everything works as designed We will take care of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tester007 Posted January 29, 2013 Report Share Posted January 29, 2013 Good. Just wanted to know if it will work that way and it's a known bug Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 31, 2013 Report Share Posted January 31, 2013 Bug is fixed. Will be released in next build - beginning of next week. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wolfcry0 Posted January 31, 2013 Report Share Posted January 31, 2013 Most of my files are video editing projects (500MB-10GB file size) and photos (20-50MB file size), so having differential sync would save a huge amount of time and bandwidth as it wouldn't have to send a whole 2GB file after I changes a small part of it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted January 31, 2013 Report Share Posted January 31, 2013 We got it. We'll do it. This year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
k2enemy Posted February 5, 2013 Report Share Posted February 5, 2013 I'd just like to throw in my support for this feature. I know a lot of people (including myself) that will use this for keeping scientific datasets in sync, and it would be problematic to re-transfer several gigabyte files when one line changes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rstarkov Posted April 19, 2013 Report Share Posted April 19, 2013 We got it. We'll do it. This year.This is awesome. This is the last ingredient missing from being my personal holy grail of sync tools! +1 from me.(use case: TrueCrypt volumes) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kos13 Posted April 19, 2013 Report Share Posted April 19, 2013 If you read carefully, Sync already has diff that works on block level and fits perfectly with TrueCrypt. Since it is drive mirror of the same size, it is changed by blocks. Sync will not transfer blocks that are similar between peers.The rsync diff is used when you add/remove some data from a file. Sync doesn't handle this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stradric Posted April 23, 2013 Report Share Posted April 23, 2013 The rsync diff is used when you add/remove some data from a file. Sync doesn't handle this.Ah, I didn't completely understand until you said that. Now it makes sense. I was trying to sync back an entire VM and it ended up transferring the entire 19GB, which filled the disk on the other end and broke the transfer -- luckily leaving the old intact file in the trash folder. Now I'm wondering if I could get the diff functionality you mentioned simply by setting the VM to allocate the entire virtual disk. I will check back if I find success... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elziko Posted April 24, 2013 Report Share Posted April 24, 2013 Now I'm wondering if I could get the diff functionality you mentioned simply by setting the VM to allocate the entire virtual disk. I will check back if I find success...I'd be interested in your results - I'm hoping to use Sync to synchronise all my virtual machines between two computers where each VM is around 25Gb. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stradric Posted April 25, 2013 Report Share Posted April 25, 2013 Well, it took a few days to get going. I originally transferred the vmdk to my home machine using BTSync prior to my post. I tried syncing with the dynamic disks, but it wanted to transfer the whole 20GB files. I don't even have 20GB of free space on either host disk, so that failed. That's when I saw kos13's post about the file sizes.So, to get matching file sizes, I converted both vmdks to fixed disks with the VboxManage tool. Their sizes and file names were identical. The vmdk on my home machine had an earlier modified date than the vmdk on my work machine. Upon trying the sync, BTSync still wanted to transfer the entire files. Additionally, it wanted to send the older vmdk up to my work machine to replace the newer one. Needless to say, the whole process failed due to lack of free space. I managed to recover the vmdk too.My next step is to ditch the home fixed vmdk and resync the work one down, then try to make changes to the home one and see if it transfers only chunks. It's probably going to be another day or so before that experiment is complete. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stradric Posted April 26, 2013 Report Share Posted April 26, 2013 Aaand... that didn't work either. This time I used BTSync to transfer down the fixed vmdk from my work to home. After using the work VM and shutting down, BTSync proceeded to sync down the entire 20GB file. So it looks like the current version of BTSync does not support this use case. I'm confident that it will be able to do so eventually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ericb Posted May 3, 2013 Report Share Posted May 3, 2013 Delta sync is one of two features that I'd love to see added to BTSync. +1 for me. The other feature is one of a sort of global hash table where two hashes of two files that are identical wouldn't have to be transferred because that block of data is already at the destination. According to this thread, they're going to do it:Perhaps these two features are related. I'm not a developper so I don't know.What's the roadmap for proposed features? When can we expect a version 1.0 release? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ericb Posted July 29, 2013 Report Share Posted July 29, 2013 Is there any activity on this feature yet or can I expect it to be a long way off yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreatMarko Posted July 29, 2013 Report Share Posted July 29, 2013 Is there any activity on this feature yet or can I expect it to be a long way off yet?This is a VERY old thread! - please see the Unofficial FAQ entry "When a file changes, does BitTorrent transfer the entire file again, or just the part that's changed?" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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