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No major harm, but a few scary moments...
I tried the BitTorrent Sync on some miscellaneous files and it worked well, whereupon I set it loose on my work directories and it did the right thing... mostly. This post may turn into a bug report, I don't know. In any event, it's a brain dump of what I discovered in the course of events.
BitTorrent Sync has a mechanism by which you can specify files and folders to ignore inside a folder being synced. My intuitive understanding of "ignore" is that the specified files and folders will simply be left alone and not synced. However, despite having specified my "My Dropbox" folder in this list, the software insisted on attempting to sync just one subdirectory in the folder. Why the software would have anything to do with a folder it has been instructed to ignore is buggy enough without then deciding to sync only part of said folder. Go figure.
What really raised my eyebrows was the disappearance of some directories that, on one machine, I had expected to be synced (they ended up in a directory called .SyncIgnore, and I am grateful for that, as it meant I didn't have to break out my most recent backup). I was going to add that I discovered some directories on my Windows 8 machine to have simply gone AWOL without a trace, but after doing a formal system restart (as, over the past few days, I had been putting the poor thing to sleep at night instead of shutting it down), it turns out the directories are still there.
Which then starts me to thinking that, apart from the strange behavior with "My Dropbox," there's less wrong with BitTorrent Sync than I thought.
On thing is pretty clear, however, based on my experience thus far. Once the bugs are wrung out of the software, it's going to be a pretty useful tool for keeping files synced on multiple machines.
Cheers...
BitTorrent Sync has a mechanism by which you can specify files and folders to ignore inside a folder being synced. My intuitive understanding of "ignore" is that the specified files and folders will simply be left alone and not synced. However, despite having specified my "My Dropbox" folder in this list, the software insisted on attempting to sync just one subdirectory in the folder. Why the software would have anything to do with a folder it has been instructed to ignore is buggy enough without then deciding to sync only part of said folder. Go figure.
What really raised my eyebrows was the disappearance of some directories that, on one machine, I had expected to be synced (they ended up in a directory called .SyncIgnore, and I am grateful for that, as it meant I didn't have to break out my most recent backup). I was going to add that I discovered some directories on my Windows 8 machine to have simply gone AWOL without a trace, but after doing a formal system restart (as, over the past few days, I had been putting the poor thing to sleep at night instead of shutting it down), it turns out the directories are still there.
Which then starts me to thinking that, apart from the strange behavior with "My Dropbox," there's less wrong with BitTorrent Sync than I thought.
On thing is pretty clear, however, based on my experience thus far. Once the bugs are wrung out of the software, it's going to be a pretty useful tool for keeping files synced on multiple machines.
Cheers...