ifolder rocks!

By basd on Dec 3, 2009 | In kde4, opensuse, cloud computing

Well, okay, perhaps I am being premature about this. But, in any event, I have an ifolder server running and I am [test] synchronizing folders on two computers, plus the server.

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One issue I have wanted to deal with is maintaining synchronization of things like Firefox, Thunderbird and the like. On my linux, the default locations for these files are in "hidden" folders in the home directory. So, how to synchronize?

My current experiment runs like this: I first copy identical folders to the two computers. I then make links from the "hidden" folders to my sychronized ifolder. Ifolder then updates the two hidden folders simultaneously. It seems to be working so far.

One concern I have is, "what if I inadvertently delete an important directory? I could lose it not only on the computer I have disasterized, but also on all the synchronized ones as well. Seems to me I should maintain an occasional, separate, backup copy as well. Which, of course, raises the level of complexity. But, I almost accomplished such a disaster already, since my first effort involved propagating a synchronized version of the hidden folder, then copying it to the second computer's hidden folder location, then deleting the propagated ifolder file and replacing it with a link.

You can guess where this went. Ifolder, somewhat correctly, determined I had deleted the hidden folder on one computer, so poised itself to delete all those files on the original computer from whence they came. Do not know what the ultimate outcome might have been, since I then disconnected the ifolder clients and formulated a different approach.

I had a similar experience with PowerFolder. I wanted to synch some of my folders to my web server. PowerFolder offers web server space (at a price much higher than my own webserver), but no tool to synch to my own web server. So, I created an sshfs link to my web server and synchronized.

The only problem with that turned out to be if the mount point is ~/home/lan/ and sshfs disconnects, "lan" suddenly looks very empty -- whereupon PowerFolder would delete all the local files. Possibly this could have been avoided by making the sync file one that is only available on the webserver (so hopefully disregarded when not connected) -- but I quit using PowerFolder before I tried it, due to the free version of PowerFolder becoming much more restrictive.

I haven't investigated what "roll back" possibilities exist in iFolder yet. Fortunately in PowerFolder, it tracked deleted files and they could be recovered -- at least for a period of time. Although, with a lot of files and with multiple versions, figuring out what needed to be recovered became something of a headache.