_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Show HN: Sink â Sync any directory with any device on your local network
danjc wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
I have a few qualms with this app ;)
newman314 wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
I have been a Resilio Sync user for a while but find it increasingly
fragile and prone to randomly breaking. Reconnecting always seems to be
a roll of the dice if something gets deleted and I suppose this is a
good time to figure out if there are better alternatives.
Syncthing on iOS still seems to be iffy so I'd be interested if Sink
can help fill in this space eventually.
justinkramp wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Havenât looked at this yet but have been amazed at rsync for a
similar task. Used it to deploy and maintain a retail digital
experience across a few dozen stores more than a decade ago and it was
great. Use it for small home projects now.
sandreas wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
As reference (for feature comparison or whatever) here are some tools I
use to keep things in sync, some have already been mentioned:
rsync - I think everybody knows this
rclone - modern feature packed tool similar to rsync, but also more
complex
croc - a modern cross platform file transfer utility
syncthing - sync service with web gui to keep multiple devices in
sync
LocalSend - An open source GUI tool also for mobile devices
restic - a tool for encrypted backups with rolling hash deduplication
immich / ente.io - Photo backup app with frontend and backend
zfs - filesystem with send and receive
All of these are (partly) open source and free to use. Hope it helps.
rcarmo wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
This is nice. Kudos for using Bonjour/Zeroconf, which I do too for
everything that needs self-discovery.
gwbas1c wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
> note: this is still a veeery big wip, as there are many features that
I have planned to added; you can see this on the bottom of this readme.
I spent a decade as a lead on an industry-leading commercial sync
product. Once you start working on details, tools like this can get
very time consuming.
(They're also very fun to work on.)
The devil is all the corner cases, and there are a LOT of corner cases
in sync; especially if you handle renames as renames. (IE, instead of
treating a rename as a delete and recreate.)
My $0.02: Decide if this is a one-off project, hobby, or something you
want to turn full time. Remember that what might seem like a bug, or a
weekend project, could turn into a long coding journey. It's important
to understand your commitment going in, because you don't want to "bite
off more than you can chew."
You can find my website in my profile (and thus email) if you want to
contact me and ask anything.
tomhow wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
[stub]
saaspirant wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
From the headline, I thought it was a way to easily note your
thoughts because I unless I e-mail myself my thoughts, I never look
at them.
neepi wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I solved this problem again recently as well. After evaluating
various synchronisation methods I thought it would be a good idea to
design a new methodology which doesn't reinvent the wheel. Completely
out of the box thinking. It took a few days to come up with a
solution which worked on paper and a couple of weeks to implement it.
I call this onecomputer. What you do is uninstall all sync software
from your devices and put everything other than the primary one in
the cupboard. Job done. No problems with conflict resolution. No race
conditions. No resource and locking issues. Fast, reliable and does
not depend on any third party provider or network. It just works. No
wheel reinventing - this is uninvention.
sirbread wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
i can't tell if this is satire or not
neepi wrote 17 hours 36 min ago:
I haven't decided yet :)
More seriously, I am mostly working like this now. I've had at
least some data loss or reliability from every single sync
solution I've tried so am practicing avoidance where possible.
I really want something to work but I can't find anything that
does and I've tried all major ecosystems and syncthing etc.
globalnode wrote 18 hours 16 min ago:
its something, lets move along quietly and hope they dont
notice...
also not sure why so many have a love affair with syncthing, id
never heard of it but more diverse software in the world is a
good thing imho. the more wheels reinvented the better, its fun!
shaism wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
How do I get stuff from my âonesmartphoneâ to the
âonecomputerâ?
Or shall I also put the âonesmartphoneâ in the cupboard?
neepi wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
The phone here basically does IMAP (which is sync I suppose) and
gets plugged into the computer and stuff copied around as
required manually, which turns out to be rarely as it's not the
primary device!
bilekas wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
The commit log reads exactly like my stream of consciousness with
personal projects :
URI [1]: https://github.com/sirbread/sink/commits/main/
dang wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Could you please see [1] and not post like this to HN, and
particularly not to Show HN threads?
We want this place to be welcoming and friendly, not brutal and
mean to newcomers and students. I'm sure you don't want to be that
kind of person, or having that kind of effect, in any case.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398799
Daril wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
I use Syncthing in combination with Cryptomator for sensible files,
but there is also the Localsend app :
URI [1]: https://localsend.org/
bbno4 wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
[flagged]
dang wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Could you please see [1] and not post like this to HN, and
particularly not to Show HN threads?
We want this place to be welcoming and friendly, not brutal and
mean to newcomers and students. I'm sure you don't want to be that
kind of person, or having that kind of effect, in any case.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398799
sirbread wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
lol sure i "reinvented it" but the reason I made it in the first
place is because my school's whitelist. they whitelisted certain
apps (like Python 3.11, for our Comp Sci class) and i've been using
that since to get around the whitelist :p
jonwinstanley wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
Re-inventing a product is great for learning. Looks like a decent
project and hopefully you had a good time solving the issues.
poisonborz wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
[flagged]
dang wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
Can you please not be a jerk in HN comments and especially not in
Show HN threads? There are special rules for Show HNs: [1] .
Keep in mind that not everyone sharing their work here is a
grizzled veteran. Some are enthusiastic people learning to do
something for the first time. The community here should welcome
such users, not beat up on them, which is the effect that a comment
like yours can all too easily have (though I'm sure this was not
your intent).
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
maweki wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
I don't really understand what the difference is to syncthing (or
value over syncthing, as it is very mature and also works across the
Internet). You share folders and other devices are discovered locally
and you decide which devices to trust and to share with.
kunley wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
[flagged]
dang wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Can you please not post like this to HN and especially not to Show
HN threads? (There are special rules for the latter: [1] .)
I'm sure your intention was to be helpful, but this reads like a
putdown, and the kind of effect that putdowns can have on
newcomers, students, and so on is exactly the opposite of what we
would like HN to be.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
notpushkin wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
[flagged]
sirbread wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
Totally understand your doubts.
I mainly made this program to solve a tiny issue that got annoying
and repetitive, so I asked myself, "Can I automate this?"
1. Since I mainly use Windows (for school software to run), I
cannot simply do this, considering our school blocks any 3rd part
app that isn't in their whitelist.
2. Sure, it doesn't _replace_ a USB drive, but it makes it a lot
easier, which can _lessen_ the use of a USB drive.
3. Again, I really just made this for myself and a couple of
friends at my high school so we can share projects without too much
hassle. I just wanted to share it with the world because maybe
someone else has the same dumb problem, which could help them too.
It's not meant to be a business, just a tool. I'll call that a win
if it saves one other person from emailing a file to themselves.
dewey wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
Iâd guess that the overlap of people who email themselves files
also use Gmailâ¦which would then also just have Google Drive.
Why not use that?
notpushkin wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
Sorry, I might have edited that /s in too late! This is actually
one of the early comments from the Dropbox launch thread:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224
saaspirant wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
I was gonna link to the same thing!
Text looked familiar
drcongo wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
That made my morning.
skrebbel wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
FWIW i think you ruined it by editing that â/sâ in
notpushkin wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
I thought about it for a bit, but Iâm worried the author might
not recognize this copypasta and try to answer it on its face
value.
(It is, of course, the famous Dropbox comment: [1] )
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224
Imustaskforhelp wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Haha. I guess I had heard the story of dropbox, why not ftp,
but I guess this was the story!
I guess it is funny to me that SVN/CVS was there in 2007 since
I think git wasn't even invented at the time but now new people
won't even know what SVN/CVS are, I only got to know them
because I wanted to download a specific folder of github and
some stackoverflow comment mentioned svn
notpushkin wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
Apparently, the first version of Git was released in 2005,
but Iâm not sure a lot of people have heard about it before
GitHub has been launched in 2008.
Wild times! (I was 10, my preferred source control system was
âeh I have a backup somewhere I thinkâ.)
fetzu wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
MyVeryCoolApp_final_FINAL2_fixed.BAS
sirbread wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
we've all been there
alt187 wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
Be proud you did a thing. Not everything has to optimize profits,
userbase, or some other metrics. You developed something for yourself,
and saw it through until it worked, and no one can take that away from
you.
It's also much more stimulating to build something than ask like a
pedant "why this exists when Syncthing?", so, I guess the joke's on
them.
kunley wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
But the point is, the author didn't know about Syncthing. And he's
got a few of things to solve that Syncting already has. (Doesn't need
to mimic all things Syncthing has, of course).
I am all for implementing something own when one is dissatisfied with
the state of the art. But that's different than updating one's
understanding what the state if the art is
kunley wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
While I can understand (while disagreeing) why my comment was
downvoted, it is beyond my comprehension why it was in addition
_flagged_. I expressed my view on usefulness of one's effort and I
barely scratched the surface. Nothing in my comment was even
remotely disrespectful to the author; I am in fact sympathetic to
the guy and I think I was in his shoes many times. I can't think of
any other violation of anything that led someone to flag. If
someone was feeling strange or dubious about my comment, a
civilised way is to ask "what did you mean", wait for reply and
then judge.
This site is a democratic place; thus I am asking the flagger to
tell what in his mind was the alleged reason for flagging.
throw10920 wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
I vouched for your comment. It didn't break the guidelines, and
therefore shouldn't have been flagged. In the future, you can
always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com if you were flagged
and think you shouldn't have been (or other mod-y stuff). (I am
not a mod)
odo1242 wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
From the README: i built this to solve a specific problem: syncing
files on a locked-down school laptop where python was one of the
only things i was allowed to run.
sirbread wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
thank you for the kind words :)
nobodywillobsrv wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
As a syncthing user who has also thought about this problem,
syncthing is good but reading around it seems like running it on a
phone is a pain and then simply pasting from share or clipboard is
yet another pain to implement. So there is possibly some useful
stuff TODO in bridging all that friction. I haven't literally tried
but have read about it all once and decided not to. Cool space of
problems.
shwouchk wrote 4 hours 1 min ago:
saw this post last night and tbh thought it a bit weird since
initially it was described by author as âalternative to
emailing yourselfâ - like, really? after 20 years of dropbox?
the countless competitors it spawned, including OSS as well as by
all major email providers???
came back curious to see if the discussion took a different
direction from besides sarcasm or another 30 posts saying âwhy
not syncthing?â - glad to see the couple to comments including
OP and yours as constructive.
that being said, iâm a syncthing user, including running my own
(st) discovery server on openwrt. aside from some annoyance at
rather frequent conflicts and being browser based, im running it
on all 5 major OSs, including ios (mobius sync) and android.
i strongly disagree that running it on a phone is a pain, and in
fact, found it the most reliable and versatile sync solution for
ios by far - and that includes icloud, dropbox, google drive and
google photos.
the only thing that comes close is apple photos, but thatâs
specifically for photos. and that too, only because of the deep
os integration, ie always running in the background and allowing
seamless access to older photos that are not on device. even
then, thereâs always a mysterious slight difference in # of
items reported on the mac vs the phone - âeventual
consistencyâ, where âeventualâ is t=infinity i suppose.
MrGilbert wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
Congrats! It's always neat to have something out there in the wild. :)
For quickly sending a file, url, text or whatever between two devices,
I usually use a selfhosted version of [1] ( [2] ). Thanks to a web
interface, it works on almost every device.
URI [1]: https://tnxfr.com
URI [2]: https://github.com/mustakimali/just-an-email
kinow wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
Most of whayt I emailed myself were links to have a look at later.
I stopped doing that after learning about the sync feature in Firefox,
and the option to send tabs across devices.
saaspirant wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
I used to use Firefox tabs too but I look at links maybe once a week
and keeping too many tabs is annoying for me. So I am back to
emailing notes and thoughts
dewey wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
What is the selling point over the very mature Syncthing? Iâve been
using that for this use case for many years, with the additional
benefit of also being able to sync it to my server, having a UI and
being in all package managers already.
lxgr wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
99% less configuration and UI surfaces come to mind.
Syncthing is great, but it does include everything and the kitchen
sink. That's often great, but not always.
sunshine-o wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Absolutely.
Syncthing is great but I really wish for a syncthing-lite you could
deploy and configure easily.
The version we have today is really suffering from a lot of legacy.
I remember they are working on a big v2 with a revamp of the API
which is a mess but they had to give up on getting rid on that
horrible XML config file because it was too much work.
Be aware they also recently silently disabled the sync of symlinks
on the android build, what can cause a lot of bad surprises.
They did define some specs of their protocols [0] but i haven't
seen a alternative implementation yet.
- [0]
URI [1]: https://docs.syncthing.net/specs/index.html
donatj wrote 16 hours 40 min ago:
Syncthing is the most confounding user-unfriendly software I have
ever had the displeasure of using. It makes a process that should be
pretty easy, pick some folders and share some keys remarkably painful
and convoluted.
4k93n2 wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
resilio sync (formerly bittorrent sync) has a nicer UI and its
probably easier to use. ive been using syncthing for 5+ years now
though and can't think of the last time i had any issues with it.
its probably just a bit more confusing if youre coming from
something more polished and centralised like dropbox or those types
xnx wrote 9 hours 1 min ago:
Oh no. What makes it so hard? I was happy with the syncthing and
syncthingtray setup process.
pjerem wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
I have more mixed feelings about Syncthing than you.
I personally think itâs a power user tool rather than an easy to
use tool. The UI can feel intimidating but is actually pretty
coherent once you understand how Syncthing works.
I would compare it with Git in terms of ergonomics : a powerful
tool with its own jargon that you must understand to be able to use
it.
Like git, Syncthing chose to expose its internals to the user
rather than hiding it behind something magic. But like git, I
donât feel like there are unnecessary complexity. Once you
understand it, itâs easy to make it work because it makes sense.
throw7 wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
Syncthing is software where i think reading the manual is
recommended. it is a fine manual and clears up a lot of the
confusion. There's a lot of complexity "under the hood" and trying
to just intuit it from the settings is... as you know... confusing.
agildehaus wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
Has any open-source project done it better? Serious question, I've
been looking.
deepspace wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
I used Unison many years ago, and it worked perfectly for all my
use cases. Not sure how it stacks up these days. CLI only IIRC.
127dot1 wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
I still use Unison as it is simpler than Syncthing.
It does have GUI, which I use. I wouldn't call it pretty or
polished, but it works and I understand how it works and the
way it works is exactly how I think syncing should work.
I've also configured it to run a GUI diff tool diffuse to
easily combine changes in case of conflicts (when a file was
changed on both sides since the last sync).
I wish it was a bit more modern and re-written in a modern
language, but that's secondary qualities for a program.
pydry wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
to be fair, syncing is something that appears simple on the surface
but which is a mess of complexity under the hood.
feiss wrote 12 hours 40 min ago:
+1000 times this
shakna wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
SyncThing's insistence that a web UI be how you do everything has
caused me quite a few headaches. Especially when said UI regularly
breaks accessibility tools.
(The team do tend to fix those accessibility problems pretty fast.
But spending a couple days a month working around a tool is not my
idea of fun.)
zimpenfish wrote 17 hours 58 min ago:
> SyncThing's insistence that a web UI be how you do everything
It does have `syncthing cli ...` which -I think- lets you do
everything but to call it obtuse would be an understatement.
sirbread wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
being fr, i never even knew about syncthing until now. it's (clearly)
a lot better, but again, the reason I made this is because of my
school's software whitelist. they only allow certain apps to run on
my laptop, one of them being python due to out compsci class. since
then, I've been using it to get around whitelists and make my own
stuff.
this allows me to sync up me and my friend's stuff (like projects,
etc.) while we're in school and not have to worry about the whitelist
:)
udev4096 wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
This kind of whitelisting does absolutely nothing. It's a straight
up lolbin. Anyway, if python is allowed, then surely other
languages can be added to whitelist. Ask them to whitelist go and
use syncthing
Thrymr wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
Or just write a python script wrapper for the syncthing client :)
woodrowbarlow wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
> This kind of whitelisting does absolutely nothing.
well, aside from getting students more interested in programming,
apparently.
xeonmc wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
Necessity is the mother of invention, constraints the cradle of
imagination, and contrarian teenagers the womb of ingenuity.
sirbread wrote 10 hours 7 min ago:
trust me, I've tried asking for other programs to be on the
whitelist. if they didn't allow firefox, they definitely won't
allow synching. and I don't wanna get in trouble either lol
xeonmc wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Can you ask them to permit docker?
globular-toast wrote 18 hours 14 min ago:
My initial thought was, man, your school is lame. But maybe it's
genius? Creativity thrives in a constrained environment.
snackbroken wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
In high school they had a few information kiosk computers spread
around the various buildings; two in the library, one in the main
reception, one in the cafeteria, and one in the mostly unused
hallway right outside the computer club room. They were locked
down so you could only navigate some intranet pages using a
rudimentary on-screen keyboard, with the rest of the hardware in
a locked cabinet.
Guess which one got digitally defaced a couple of times each
semester. Guess which ones got left alone. Genius move by the IT
guy. Every time it happened he would come talk to the club
members about the difference between whitehat and blackhat
hacking but other than that nobody ever got in trouble.
ryanjshaw wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
Thatâs perfectly valid. Maybe add it to the top of your readme
explaining what problem it solves (need to sync files between
machines and all you can use is python).
fxtentacle wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
I especially like that Syncthing can do encrypted revision backups to
untrusted servers. My workstation and laptop get synchronised. And in
case I ever accidentally overwrite a file, thereâs the past five
revisions on an offsite server.
lostmsu wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
How does your setup for the backup look like? Won't you lose the
data if the source of backup data gets lost together with the keys?
progx wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
NIH?
_pferreir_ wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
This ^
I also recommend magic wormhole.
johnisgood wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
And LocalSend.
anerli wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
^ syncthing is nice
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