
Ori File System - rcarmo
http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/#
======
UserRights
To the authors: please add immediately accessible documentation, best in form
of a 'Quick Start' document. Also please add one page to your website that you
call 'Features' where you describe what it can do / can not do and add another
page to your site that you call 'Documentation' where you put the USER
DOCUMENTATION. No, nobody wants to read a paper to get some sync software up
and running. THANKS!

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sillysaurus3
I promise I'm not being dismissive.

My question is:

 _Ori is a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers
the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution.
We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify
the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication
instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes._

Does a user actually want to do any of these things? Not a techie user, but a
user. Someone who cares about their photos, for example.

One big use case, which I often run into, is that Dropbox is very valuable
because it serves your files through a website. Yes, that means Dropbox and
governments have access to that data. On the other hand, it's fine for Dropbox
and governments to access my "chatlog with my ISP where I complain about a
late fee and ask for a refund" that I saved to Dropbox but need to pull up on
my laptop which doesn't have Dropbox installed. That type of thing is where
Dropbox really shines, so I'm not sure I'd want to put my docs into a system
which doesn't have a web interface.

Those kinds of "casual documents" are extremely common. I'd say most of my
stuff in Dropbox isn't actually sensitive, whereas a small percentage is
highly sensitive. It'd be great to store the highly sensitive into a
filesystem like this, since I could control it directly, but that involves
quite a lot of effort to set Ori up and to understand it. And it's not
entirely clear that it's more secure than, say, encrypting my Dropbox files
directly.

In summary, what precisely is the value add that Ori brings to the user? I'm
trying hard to see it, and I want to believe there is one.

~~~
fit2rule
I think there is definitely a growing segment of people who do not want to
contribute to the growing surveillance of their lives, but nevertheless do
want to have a way to share their data and details with whoever they want,
with trust, at a personal level.

I know a few families, for example, who are now using their own social-media
apps built by family members, and for which there is no outside access - yet
they have their own network, trust system, shared media and data, and so on.

It is _completely_ within their control.

So there are people out there for whom Ori and its peer technologies are very
important. Not everybody wants to just genuflect in front of the ultra-
corporate ruler(s). Its quite possible to continue using computers unhindered
by third parties; tools like Ori assist that - technologically as well as
culturally. Get all your friends on their own p2p networks.

~~~
izacus
On the other hand, Synology NASes with new DSM already offer a better
alternative - web access to data, sync with other computers and other services
while you still own your data. In that case Ori doesn't bring all that much to
the table :)

~~~
heydenberk
Synology NASes have had a number of security vulnerabilites and privacy
breaches over the last several years.

~~~
izacus
Yes, and they were rather quickly patched. I'm not really sure what are you
trying to say... to avoid security vulnerabilities, just upload all your data
to a foreign datacenter?

~~~
nyolfen
check out the synology employee

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jacob019
My company has three offices. We have about 200GB of shared storage. We often
need to access and write files that are 10-20MB in size. Currently we have a
centralized file server at the main office and a VPN. Using the file server at
the main office is a pleasure, using it from the other two offices is slow. I
am looking for a stable distributed filesystem, so that I can have a full copy
of the data on a server at each of the three locations. I wish to share
between each server and it's local clients via both NFS and Samba. Clients
should be able to read and write to their local server, and the three servers
should collaborate to keep all their data in sync. Can Ori offer this?
Something else?

~~~
beagle3
Depending on the exclusivity/locking requirements, and the amount of changes,
you might be better off with complete replication among offices, such as
DropBox (if you trust them) / SparkleShare (if you want to host yourself -
sync is less efficient though), or simply rsync scripts going back and forth.

A key for convenience, which DropBox delivers, is to fetch the data before you
need it. 200GB is not that much in the grand scheme of things today - if you
only have 1GB/day of changing data, it could be viable.

~~~
jacob019
I set up syncthing, it's syncing now. I think this software will do exactly
what I want. It's a standalone binary and runs as a standard user space app,
keeping data synchronized between all the systems without the need to mount a
new filesystem or do any advanced configuration.

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ollifi
I have not looked into this much yet, but I think comparing it to Dropbox etc.
like many are in here is silly. There is a huge amount of use cases where
people work with large amounts of shared data in lan environments over nfs and
such. This is very much tied to location and becomes a bit tricky to make
offline, remote, conflict proof. Something like git can support distributed
workflows in work groups, but it only works with light weight data and needs
pretty educated users. I think programmes under appreciate how horrible it
still is to work together with others using computers.

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hucker
I wasn't quite able to grasp what this is. Is it similar to dropbox / btsync
(without the bt part) in what it provides to the user? What are the usecases?
Looks cool anyways, and I love that packages are already available!

~~~
facepalm
Neither dropbox nor btsync are free software afaik. I would be excited about a
viable open source alternative.

~~~
urza
[http://syncthing.net](http://syncthing.net)

~~~
higherpurpose
If only Syncthing was as easy to use as BTSync.

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zvikara
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7072492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7072492)

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quchen
I don't see any end-user documentation (only a short building section). Is
this not a release, but the project's "work in progress" page?

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, I would have to say that Ori has the worst documentation ever. Except,
this is pretty useful:

[http://sigops.org/sosp/sosp13/papers/p151-mashtizadeh.pdf](http://sigops.org/sosp/sosp13/papers/p151-mashtizadeh.pdf)

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logician76
Reminds me of Brad Fitzpatrick's camlistore
[http://camlistore.org](http://camlistore.org)

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BozeWolf
Looks kind of interesting to me. How does it compare to use a git repo as a
"decentralized file store"? What is the speed of this thing.. I see it uses
fuse, which generally isnt that fast. Speed probably isnt a goal, but none the
less important. To make this a succes, docs should be available. Now it feels
like a research project to me.

~~~
BozeWolf
I quickly scrolled through the paper a few people mentioned earlier. About
speed:An evaluation shows that as a local file system, Ori has low overhead
compared to a File system in User Space (FUSE) loopback driver; as a network
file system, Ori over a WAN outperforms NFS over a LAN.

Interesting. Git is mentioned as well. I guess i have to read the paper after
i finished cleaning the house ;)

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aristidb
This is pretty cool stuff, but when I tried it in mid-2014 (release 0.8.1),
there were stability issues with orifs, and the user interface was rather
confusing. Quite possibly these issues are resolved now, as I see there have
been new commits again from October onwards.

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vbit
Usually I want only a subset of my synchronized data on my phone. Can I set
this up so all my data is synced to my nas but only some to my phone?

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jokoon
does it work best on local networks, or is it also good when there's high
latency and lower bandwidth ?

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kobigurk
Hallowed are the Ori

~~~
dpogg1
Came in to post this. Thank you.

