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Comment by semiprivate | Hacker News Reader

The article is about setting up your own simple syncing service for non-mission-critical data like notes. I don't think you see the point 'cos:

    a) You didn't read the article.
    b) Tinkering with technology to do fun things is of no interest to you.

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I read the article. The author started by whining that he lost months of notes. His solution was to beef up his syncing. I still have no idea how he came to that conclusion when backup technology has existed since the dinosaurs. I guess that technology just isn't new or exciting enough to blog about.

I think the author really just wanted an excuse to use his Raspberry Pi.

I do love to tinker. But I don't do foolish things like replace backups with fragile dogshit.

Author here, I've had plenty of excuses to use my Pi in the past, this is just the latest one. I think you are incorrect in characterizing this as "fragile dogshit", this solution is in fact much more robust than my previous cloud solution.

BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.

> BTSync also does built in versioning which solves the backup issue.

So for example, if a person was working on a thesis document and then accidentally overwrote that with a blank version which gets synced across all the nodes, it would be possible to reverse this action and recover the original thesis document ?

While I haven't exercised this functionality yet my understanding is yes that is possible. You can specify the number of days to store history. (defaults to 30)

I don't believe that is the case. I think it only stores deleted documents in the .SyncArchive folder, and does not log modifications.

Of course running a cronjob on your raspberry pi to do incremental backups would be a fun way of tackling that problem.

most here would keep his/her document versioned in subversion or git. I don't think technically minded individuals don't confuse syncing and backups (or versioning). This however does not apply to non-technical people. That is where dropbox is a win, since they do versioning.

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