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Comment by nvr219 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I should do something like this:

~/Dropbox/Google Drive/Skydrive/[ALL MY ACTUAL FILES HERE]

That way I'm syncing with three different providers and if two go down my data is still available.

I pay for dropbox so I can fit all my ISOs in dropbox, but the high priority docs (which total under 2gb) would be synced to all three (with the confidential stuff in a TrueCrypt file of course).

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That's an interesting approach, but I wonder if it isn't subject to "thrashing" as soon as you start dealing with documents that are edited in more than one place.

For instance, imagine that you have a laptop L and a desktop D. You edit shared document X in your "actual files" folder on L. Version 2 of X is saved on L, and you currently have version 1 of X on D.

1.) Dropbox happens to notice that X needs to be updated from v1 to v2 on D. Dropbox updates X to v2.

2.) Skydrive has not yet been notified of the changes to X. It changes X back to v1 for you on D.

3.) Dropbox notices that X has been modified on D. It sees that the new v1 X has an updated timestamp, so it assumes that this is a better version of X. Dropbox saves this as v3 (which is identical to the original v1).

4.) Dropbox pushes the v3 change to L, erasing your v2 work. Oops!

Basically, unless every synchronization service follows precisely the same protocol, you're gonna have a bad time.

This is beginning to sound like the script to Primer. Ugh. I'd have to somehow force skydrive to do its sync before google, before dropbox.

Better to use one primary sync service and one secondary backup service , and during a primary outage, revert to hand management of edits.

Any decent synchronization system must not replace a file with a version with an older timestamp, must set timestamps on synchronized files to exactly the same values as the timestamps on source file, and must replace the files atomically.

As long as everyone follows these basic rules, and you only edit files on one system at once, it's going to be OK.

(which is pretty obvious, btw)

Use git-annex assistant and set up multiple remotes.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

Maybe someone did ~/Google Drive/Google Drive and created a rift in the space time continuum.

Just write a cron job to sync a folder to S3, it works pretty well for those of us doing that as a backup to all these services.

Or use any commercial backup system.

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