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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

That might very well rule Sync out for personal use by the general public. The benefit of Dropbox (and similar server backed services) is that the most up-to-date version of a file is simply there as soon as you are connected to the Internet. Most people who have two computers won’t be using them both at the same time. For example, a common use case for these services is syncing files while you are traveling. Requiring a user who edits files on a laptop to turn their laptop on when they get back to the home/office in order for the changes to be recognize on their desktop seems like a big step backwards. In that use case Sync would just be a glorified USB thumb drive.

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This project is useless if they don't figure out a way to serve files without both machines being turned on, there is also the problem of syncing with multiple clients beside that.

I see two key use cases that could cause trouble:

1)a co-worker turned his computer off and went home from work, the syncing couldn't complete even if only a single doc was left

2)Because there is no central server if all of my coworkers in a distributed team sync with my new shared folder at the same time, it is required that I own a connection capable of supporting that kind of traffic, because it would be almost the same as streaming a video to multiple users, not to mention that I would probably have to avoid to browse the web for pretty much anything else in the meanwhile.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with 1- I don't think any service ever can transfer files to a machine that isn't on. As soon as the co-worker shows up on Monday, the transfer will finish.

As far as 2 is concerned though, that is not the case. Don't forget, it's built on top of BT. As each piece of the file gets transferred to other clients by the original machine, the other clients will be able to send those pieces out too. In theory it will be faster than a transfer from a central server.

1-Actually Dropbox lets everyone do just that, I can access the shared folder via the dropbox website whenever I want, download files in there and even access the old or deleted versions..something I see very unlikely in this case for now

Dropbox has servers running all the time.

What they're saying is that this is an important advantage that BT Sync lacks.

Oh I see what you're saying. Bottom line, there needs to be at least 1 copy of each piece available to pull. It also definitely lacks a lot of the features that Dropbox provides on top of file syncing.

I haven't yet looked to see how this service works so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you could solve this problem by either leaving the desktop turned on (so that it syncs immediately whenever the laptop changes), or coordinating with the IT department and having them do the same using a file server the desktop will have access to (which IT departments will like because it makes it easier to centralize backups).

This is indeed the solution. If you need the feature "needs to work without needing both computers on at the same time", add a third computer that IS always on. Might cost you a small amount of money on say EC2 or something, but probably cheaper than drop box.

That is an acceptable solution for the HN community, that is not a solution for the general public. Dropbox has reached wider success because you don't need to have an EC2 or know what one is in order to use Dropbox.

Unless you have a tools folder with a ton of files and Dropbox has no way to know which ones are the ones you want now. It can take up to a day to sync a large amount of files in my experience.

If I have to devise some system to zip my important stuff and keep that up to date, then I may as well just use BTSync for free.

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