Auto Sync is culumitive ???

[Siteweb65]

Hi

Ive had a few hours to play with Gbridge in autosync mode, and have discovered a problem.

If I autosync a directory with 4 files (the number isnt important), then delete the files from the shared directory, then resync (either auto or manual) the 4 files stay in the remote directory, if I then add 4 more files in the shared directory and sync they appear WITH the first 4 in the remote directory. Again deleteing all files from the shared directory and syncing, I get 0 in the shared directory and all 8 in the remote.

[admin]

Right, to prevent accident wrong operation, we don't do any delete in the destination folder. Imaging this: you chose c:\ as your destination folder unintentionally to sync a small folder, if autosync do deletion, it will wipe out all files/dirs under your c:\.

We are thinking of good way to avoid mis-config while provide 100% mirroring. If you have any suggestion, please let us know. Thanks!

[Siteweb65]

Originally Posted by admin

Right, to prevent accident wrong operation, we don't do any delete in the destination folder. Imaging this: you chose c:\ as your destination folder unintentionally to sync a small folder, if autosync do deletion, it will wipe out all files/dirs under your c:\.

We are thinking of good way to avoid mis-config while provide 100% mirroring. If you have any suggestion, please let us know. Thanks!

Then you cant really call this a sync operation, the whole idea of sync is to keep two directories in perfect, errrhh ....... sync !! Most other sync programs I use will prompt you if they find substantial differences between the two directories, and you can set the level, so if for example more that 30% of files were found to be out of sync the operation would halt for confirmation, usually a bubble message on the toolbar alerts you to this , and one even has the cool feature of being able to send an email to you, incase the machine is remote and you wouldnt see the bubble. However none of these existing progs offer the service to machines not in the same network or running server software, so youd be the first AFAIK.

Whilst your considering that, how about a full two way sync operation option too, so any file changed on either shared or destination would be mirrored by the other, this is vastly important for commercial use, like mine where Im trying to keep data the same on two machines 4000 miles apart, again in the event that both files have been changed it prompts a 'which one you want' message, this does mean that you'd need to save a filelist in each directory to be able to determine its state at last sync.

Unfortunately my application wont work until you decide to implement the true sync operation in para1.

I would love to see 2 way sync introduced. I too run a small home biz and need this feature. It would be especially neat if it introduced extranet like abilities with file locking or 'open alerts' to avoid loosing changes in spreadsheets.

Google docs is nice but for some complex spreadsheets I doubt it will ever get proper online support.

The free Microsoft Synctoy program does a pretty good job of keeping my files in sync -- I think it uses the 'date last modified' to decide which version is newer, and replaces older ones. However I've noticed it sometimes creates backups as well, e.g. if I edit a file on 2 of my 3 computers, it will save the more recent one AND make a backup of the other edited one.

In general, I think the modified timestamp is a pretty safe way to do it. Perhaps the GBridge development team could play around with Synctoy to see if they can learn from it. Too bad the source code is probably locked away in a Microsoft vault somewhere. :P

Personally, I stopped using GBridge because I couldn't stand all the duplicate files and folders that were growing exponentially whenever I re-organized the file structure on one of my computers. I still think it's a great concept and I appreciate what has been coded so far, but without *real* synchronization it's incomplete for me.

just out of curiosity, would it be possible to use Synctoy across the VPN created by GBridge?

[admin]

We are doing a major improvement to the autosync, which will introduce different sync type. Please keep tuned.