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Comment by PhilipRoman | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of this, anyone have suggestions for an offline-tolerant distributed filesystem? Basically a dozen devices which get a few minutes/hours of internet access per day/week and not necessarily at the same time.

I've considered Git but not sure how much overhead it adds.

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Conflict resolution is the issue here.

Effectively sync systems like DropBox and iCloud do this by flagging conflicting edits when you come back online and duplicate files (new a new file name) so there is no data loss.

For a lower level file system though that's not really possible as you may be running databases, or other data models, that need to understand conflict resolution themselves.

why would you share a database over a distributed filesystem, other than for backup purposes where you only have a single source so you should never get a conflict?

See cryptocurrencies.

For my personal use case I don't really care about conflicts - they could be crudely resolved by a timestamp or even randomly. Having backups in the event of a conflict would be good. Files are never updated incrementally, just added, renamed or deleted.

That's intractable. Conflict resolution has to be done differently for different types of data, so it has to be done at a higher level than filesystem, unless you want a special filesystem that only supports a specific kind of file or has some other very significant restrictions.

i don't mean to blindly +1 but this is the actual correct answer and i think it deserves to be emphasized

Not a distributed filesystem but syncthing can easily do what you're asking for.

Seems promising, thank you.

> Speaking of this, anyone have suggestions for an offline-tolerant distributed filesystem? Basically a dozen devices which get a few minutes/hours of internet access per day/week and not necessarily at the same time. I've considered Git [...]

If you've considered git, I would suggest looking at git-annex (https://git-annex.branchable.com/), which is tuned for that kind of mostly-offline use case.

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