Imbolc Hare Moon
I wanted, for some reason, to establish a dropbox type relationship between this computer and the netbook which I take with me when I travel. This means being able to access files on this computer from a distance. This seems like a good thing to me, though just why I can’t exactly say.
Anyhow I discovered Bittorrent has a program called Sync that will do just this. It establishes a P2P relationship between one computer or device and another for this purpose. P2P = peer to peer, that is, both devices are equal to each other. Dropbox and sugarsync and google drive and microsoft skydrive offer a similar service except you have to upload your files to their cloud. Now a cloud is only a series of large hard-drives bunkered somewhere, fed lots of electricity and cooled by refrigerants.
In practical terms that means you give your data to someone else to store, then when you want it, you dial into their cloud and retrieve it. The catch? It’s free. And, as I read somewhere recently, when a computer service is free, you’re the product. That means they can access my data, mine it for advertising relevant facts and then sell me to hundreds if not thousands of others. Also, the government can, with a warrant, crack the cloud and peak inside.
With a P2P setup all the data remains on your computers, for which the government needs a warrant and all others need the password. In Sync’s case the password is a 32 character secret that establishes the bond between two computers. 32 characters make cracking the code technically very difficult. Probably not worth it for my vacation pictures.
So. I download sync. And nothing happened. Hmmm. After a lot of hmming, I investigated various help forums. Ah. That could be an issue. The two computers have to sync up timewise. I fixed that since the netbook was still on mountain time from my last trip to Colorado. Nope.
After a lot of head thumping, I tried a favorite ploy. I turned off both computers and started them up again. Ah. Syncing at last. Tomorrow I’ll learn if it does what I think it does.
This took most of the morning.
