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digitalderbs writes:
"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by twistedcubic on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:59AM
One advantage to user-initiated syncing is that there are no surprises. If a disk is corrupt and files disappear, they are not silently removed from all the other replicas. Unison catches these unintended changes, and more. I would never trust an automatic backup system for important stuff.
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Monday May 19 2014, @01:07AM
Maybe you're conflating backup systems with sync systems--they are not the same thing. A backup system keeps file history, including deleted files. A sync system simply syncs all changes.
Of course, some tools blur the distinction, like Dropbox, which keeps some file history (30 days on free accounts). And many backup systems allow pruning of old data, which could wipe out copies of deleted files, but lets you save disk space.
Anyway, the point is that you should absolutely have automatic backup systems for important stuff. If it's not automatic, it's not a serious backup system.