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Comment by freework | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've never gotten about these "syncing" apps...

Lets say I install this software on my phone, my desktop, and my work computer. I have 100+ GB free on my work computer and my home desktop, but I only have 16GB on my phone. If I add 20GB worth of movies to my sync folder, its going to fill up my phone.

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Dropbox has "selective sync", so individual PC's can choose to only sync a subset of folders from your account. Also, phones running Dropbox don't actually "sync" anything to the phone. You can choose to download individual files, or stream them straight from the Dropbox app, but it doesn't offer you any way to keep files on the phone up to date with whats in the "cloud".

I use dropsync on my phone. I have set up rules to sync screenshots to a different folder from photos, and periodically it will check a folder on dropbox and sync files from it to phone.

I believe Bazil[0] is aiming to solve this problem, among others.

[0] http://bazil.org/

git-annex allows you to see all the files, without having the contents; then you can do "git-annex get <file>" to pull it, and when you're finished, you can do "git-annex drop <file>" to free up the space.

(It also allows you to do full automatic sync, or just automatic upload, etc. And different machines can have different configurations, e.g., RaspPi syncs everything with my VPS, but my Nexus tablet doesn't)

The two clients I have used (Dropbox and Bittorrent Sync) work on a selective basis - you can download a file on an one-off basis, or keep selected files synced, rather than the whole repository.

Bitcasa (https://www.bitcasa.com/) also solves that problems by streaming your files on demand.

"Bitcasa’s proprietary block-level encryption..."

This phrase does not inspire confidence.

Dropbox, at least, lets you select which directories get synced per device, i.e. so your desktop and HTPC can share movies but your phone never sees any of them.

I thought you could only sync individual files (mark them as favorites). Can you download a folder to your iPhone with dropbox?

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