If I have now a big touchscreen, but i also want to keep a portable device. How hard is it to synchronize two Zynthian, to share the same files, mostly Snapshots* I guess. Is there a cool tool for that ?
*Snapshots should be the only thing to synchronize I presume, they will recall configuration of each chain including its processors. The material (screen, soundcard, or even screenless) can be different without to much problemsā¦ I presume.
I forgot to do exactly that before leaving home a couple of weeks ago.
I have been thinking about some cloud-sync possibilities, Iām not to familiar with cloud services, but i do run an Yuno-Host instance with Nextcloud, which works quite all right between laptop (linux), stationary(win) and cellphone(android). I would surely like to incorporate my two Zynthians in that system, i have one wall mounted at home and the 5.1 Kit for travel. I know there is something called WebDav but iām unsure how it works. But the Nextcloud environment should be able to sync with any server that has available WebDav drives.
Questions:
Has someone here done something towards autosync/cloudsync with Zynthian?
Is it possible in a simple way to incorporate some kind of web-drive functionality in Zynthianos?
Well, indeed i could evaluate how to offer a ālimited storageā associated with forum accounts. This would open some opportunity doors that we should talk about. Discourse is a super-powerful tool that we could use in many ways. Imagine sharing captures or snapshots directly from zynthian-UI. You could, for instance, share all your snapshots, or just a given subdir.
Of course, all this would be ALWAYS optional (disabled by default!) and user configurable. Think about it.
I opened this ticket a few years ago and did some investigation. A challenge is choosing a storage platform that is accessible to everyone that wonāt change our disappear.
and i would like to explore the possibility of offering a small storage associated with the zynthian forum accounts. The last would open the door for sharing with the community in a very easy and interesting way.
Google drive would be easy for me to use i guess. Iām in the process of not using G Drive, but all ready i have realized that i will be āforcedā to use it to some extent as an intermediate cloud service for other applications.
Though the idea seems sexy, we would be getting into muddy warters. I personally dislike all embedded the call home mechanisms and, somehow, this would be quite similar.
If we want users to share anything, just use impersonal mechanisms like mail, itās quite easy to set a way to process them automatically and get the job done
You could argue that it is not a call home in any wayā¦. well, weād be getting information that we should not.
That is a matter of implementation. I would like to see a way of enabling the ability to backup and restore elements of my configuration and media, integrated with remote storage. It would be disabled until a user configured and enabled it. The āhomeā to call would be where the user decides, Google, own server, no whereā¦
My use case is that I am switching between engineering, composition, performance and noodling and want a background mechanism that will deal with backups so that I donāt have another context to switch my (ever diminishing) thoughts to.
Note the ādisabled by defaultā. If this is implemented, the user would have to explicitly enable the functionality and configure credentials or API key. Nobody should be worried about privacy nor security regarding this. We are not talking about collecting metrics from centralized servers .
I would personally use Syncthing if both devices are going to be on the same network(or VPNed to the same network). You can pair devices, define folders you want synced, and then it will keep the two devices in sync as long as they can see each other on the network.
I would probably only sync one āsync" folder, and then symlinks of all the folders you want to sync into that folder. Just from a personal organizational manner.
I currently donthis to keep game emulation save files and my obsidian journal synced between my phone, desktop, and steamdeck.
It also operates similar to zynthian in that it runs headless and is configured from a web page it serves.
I found this software recently and I remembered this thread. This would look like a good fit for both community sharing and offsite backups (or 2 device sync). I like the fact we could control the syncing and not to have a constant background task. Of course there are many supported backends to keep 95% happy.
Coincidentally, this week I have been looking at cloud storage options for zynthian. I had mega.io recommended to me so I did some PoC tests and got some coffee running to backup data to that platform but today I looked at another option. Iāve always loved the use of hard links to create iterative backups that only store the difference but present as full backups. Itās super-cool. There is an application called Borgbackup that does this very well. It will work to a locally mounted file system or visa ssh to a storage device that supports hard links. There are cloud providers like BorgBase which has 10GB + 2 repository free plan and quite reasonable looking paid plans, e.g. 250 GB for $2 (USD) pcm with scaleable capacity at $0.01 / GB pcm. There is a web portal for configuration but does not allow browsing the repo. Or Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups - borg support which is similarly priced but the minimum storage is lower (200GB @ $19.20 pcm) and may be adjusted at any time in $0.008 / GB increments meaning you can start with the minimum then grow as you require. There is no support and no web portal which may be okay if we implement all the management within webconf.
I would love to see this implemented in zynthian so that I donāt need to worry about managing backups. This could be an option in webconf for manual backups and an automation for scheduled backup. It could offer restore options, with selection of date and individual files.
Personally Iād like to see multiple backends (perhaps local NAS and remote) and Iād like to choose.
Hereās a link showing many free cloud storage providersā¦
Interesting that they reference rclone for easier managing from Linux.
FYI there is a python wrapper on pypi for rclone.
Edit ā¦
It could offer restore options, with selection of date and individual files.
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