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Comment by Vipsy | Hacker News Reader

Open source drive tools live or die on three things. 1) Simple sync that never surprises. 2) Clean conflict handling you can explain to a non tech friend. 3) And zero drama upgrades.

If Twake nails those and keeps a sane on prem story with S3 and LDAP, it has a shot. The harder part is trust and docs. Clear threat model. Crisp migration guides from Drive and Dropbox. And a tiny CLI that just works on a headless box. Do these and teams will try it for real work, not just weekend tests.

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I'd add a fourth; "Make it easy to do backups and verify they're correct".

I don't think I've ever considered a data store without that being one of my top concerns. This anxiety comes from real-life experience where the business I worked at had backups enabled for the primary data store for years, but when something finally happened and we lost some production data, we quickly discovered that the backups weren't actually possible to restore from, and had been corrupted this whole time.

Schrödinger's backup. Testing the backup works involves even more engineering and non creative work.

Depends. Even something basic like "Check if the produced artifact is a valid .zip/.tar.gz" can be enough in the beginning, probably would have prevented the issue I shared before.

Then once you grow/need higher reliability, you can start adding more advanced checks, like it has the tables/data structures you expect and so on.

I had a funny where I somewhat regularly test an sql backup, then one day it didn't work, it worked the second time, the 3rd and the 4th. I have no idea why it didn't work. It turned into a permanent background process in the back of my head. The endless what-if loop.

I’m not sure what your point is. Business continuity requires a disaster recovery plan that must be tested regularly. It might be considered slog work, but like taking out the garbage, it’s non negotiable and must be done.

"Great, first you wanted more money to buy compute and storage for dev and staging separate from production, and now you even more for 'testing backups'?!"

Heh - I once made a little chunk of change, because a former client from 10-years previous discovered the shiny "DVD/CD" backups had succumbed to "bit-rot" and needed some source code.

I grabbed the hard-drive off the shelf, put it in an enclosure and handed them the source-code... (At the time, every time I upgraded my system, I would just keep my old drives, so... had a stack of them - buy a new external enclosure, slot it and park it.)

I'd like a manual "sync now" option. Sometimes I put stuff in google drive using windows explorer and it's not immediately obvious if it is syncing, why it is or isn't, or what I need to do to make it.

Syncing should be in the control of users. user should be able to trigger or abort the sync. Also it should provide some sort of indicator of progress.

I've got a theory that progress bars for main functionality tasks and the associated manual triggers in modern software are out of favor, as it creates a stage for an error to be displayed and creates expectations the customer can lean on. Less detail in errors displayed to the customer removes their ability to identify a software problem as unique or shared among others.

"Something went wrong!"

I think you're right and I think I insufficiently considered malice as the reason for a lot of this type of minimalism. This "SWW" message is great as it doesn't even give a hint as to whether the problem is with the server (all vendor's fault), the network (not vendor's fault), or a client fault (maybe vendor's fault, maybe customer just needs to update it). Users can just do brute force things like "Swipe up the app and open it up again" and eventually just give up.

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