Comment on introducing copyparty, the FOSS file server
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 2 days ago
I have a question, and I want to emphasise thar this is not criticism but a request for dive into technicalities.
In the video you mentioned copyparty has an one-way sync tool. Is there a good reason why it’s not two-way, or is this just something you weren’t motivated to do?
tripflag@lemmy.world 2 days ago
No worries, good question :>
The problem with bidirectional filesync is that it’s an absolutely massive can of worms, very easy to mess up, and the consequences of messing up are usually the worst kind (loss of data). There’s an insane amount of edgecases to keep in mind, and you need to get every edgecase right every single time, otherwise you might wipe someone’s vacation photos, or suddenly downgrade someone’s keepass database to an older version… And stuff like syncing multiple devices to the same server makes it balloon further.
I’ve started becoming more confident in copyparty’s filesystem-index database, but it’s still just a hint/guideline, with the filesystem being the only source of truth – it’s still not something I’d trust with tracking sync-state against one or more clients.
The bigger guys who offer bidirectional sync (nextcloud, syncthing, etc.) have spent years perfecting their logic, so I’d like to leave this in their capable hands.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Sync is one of those things that seems like it should be trivial but is actually super complicated.
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Thank you for your answer! Do you think copyparty would work together with Syncthing on the same backing directory, or would they compete for changes etc? Copyparty in this scenario would be for sharing content with friends and occasional remote upload
tripflag@lemmy.world 1 day ago
that should be totally fine, I think a lot of people are doing that :>
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 1 day ago
Great software!