File system Sync

Features
1

Hello,

First of all thank you for building this amazing app!

Would it be possible to create an automatic file system sync of the database?
It would be a nice option, at least as long as we don’t have a headless sync server.
I’m using syncthing to synchronize my application files p2p with e2e encryption. It really works great for Keepass and Joplin.
Of course, one could also sync via cloud storages as well with this feature in place.

Best Regards,
Sven

2

A file based sync implementation would require an unreasonable amount of work. It would be much easier to make network sync work headless. That one is in the backlog.

1 Like
3

@Andrei,

What would be the dangers of syncing the Everdo config directory across computers using syncthing? I’m curious about the technical pitfalls here. For example, are their generated IDs or other pieces of the database that might be unique to a host and, therefore, won’t play well on another machine?

Since Everdo has a descent sync built-in, I likely won’t be doing this. But I am curious about the technical issues, if any, since there a lot of directory sync tools out there and it’d be cool if Everdo worked seamlessly with them and open up many new kinds of models of data sharing for people.

4

It won’t work for several reasons. First, the database where everything is stored is only read once when the app starts. So the app will not pick up any changes committed directly to the database until a restart. Second, when the whole database is synced as a single file, then any concurrent change in the data becomes a conflict, which file sync does not handle well. I know that dropbox will create a copy of the conflicted file.
For file-based sync to work reasonably well, every property of every item would need to be represented as a separate file. Then a change to one property/file would never be in conflict with a change in another.

5

Thanks for the quick reply!

OK. Well that makes a lot of sense. I’ll avoid doing this!

BTW, the sync is working great already, I was just thinking about alternatives as I’m constantly playing around with other ideas outside of Everdo for detangling myself from private clouds. So my interest here has nothing to do with Everdo specifically. Just figuring out my whole “data life” and how it might work in a non-Cloud way.

Thanks again for entertaining my thoughts!