[plug] "Dropbox" like syncing to private servers

[Daniel Pittman]

Tim <weirdit at gmail.com> writes:

> Anyone have "Dropbox" or Ubuntu One style syncing to private servers?
> I need some bzr repositories, and my Documents folder to by syncronised
> between a number of machines that are intermittently connected to the net.

Are you sure that you don't want to solve this with the tool you are already
using, bzr?  It can do sync between the repositories, and handles conflicts
and that sort of thing for you.  Plus, y'know, free backup for "oops" recovery
purposes.

Add something like FlashBake and you should have it transparently doing the
commit part in your documents folder: http://bitbucketlabs.net/flashbake/

(Er, flashbake is a git tool, but should be either easy to adapt, or emulate,
 with whatever tool you prefer.  Add a dose of inocron or inoticoming and you
 should be able to do build that yourself for instant action on changes.)


Alternately, inosync or lsyncd provide real-time monitoring and activation for
Linux hosts based on inotify.  You could use those to get real-time or
quasi-real-time push from your clients to the central server.  Not so much
with the two-way part though.


That, sadly, is as close as you are going to get to Dropbox without doing some
more custom work though.  Which is a touch sad.  (Also, AFAIK.  If someone can
correct that I would love to hear about it. :)

> I have a private server that they can all sync to, I just need the
> software. Rsync is fine for one way backups.  Unison works for 2 way, but is
> messy. Something like Dropbox is great, but I want it to my personal server
> without using their servers.

It does do local LAN sync when the hosts are there, but the data still hits
their servers.  You /might/ get away with using encfs to protect the content,
however, that then winds up on their systems, and still get mostly useful
behaviour.  (It breaks their conflict resolution stuff a bit, sadly.)


Sorry not to be more direct help,

Regards,
        Daniel
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