Cloud sync between OS4.1FE systems

OK after the scare stories about OS4.1FE possible becoming unavailable I have purchased it for Both my classic Amiga with a BlizzardPPC card and my sam440ep now the question is what is the best dropbox or onedrive like solution for transparently transferring files between and Windows PCs.

I know this may seem like a silly thing to worry about with the other stuff you can't do natively under OS4, but my past experience seems to suggest that I can do most types of file editing I care about on a next generation Amiga and I can easily rdesktop to my PC work PC if I can't, so that just leaves me with the problem of the best way to transfer files back and forward.

As I have not really used my sam440ep since getting married back in 2012 and my A1200 Tower since shortly after OS4 was released for it I am hoping cloud computing has not totally left the Amiga world behind.

I have also been told that running OS4.1FE under WinUAE is possible so I may also need to give that a try (at £25 for OS4.1FE I can afford to by another copy to run on my Surface Pro 2), so any advice about that would also be welcome.

I think the Main thing I want to be able to do is take photo's on my phone and edit them with ImageFX and Photophenics then pass them to my Surface Pro without needing to swap memory cards about or have any device other than the one I am using switched on and to hand at the time

I run an ftp servwr on my phone for transfering data between the amiga and phone, afaik there isn't much in the way of clown er... cloud software on the amiga if any. and personally I wouldn't want any.

And FE is not going to be "unavailable". If the demand is there, and current stock runs out, more will be produced.

Bear in mind Hyperion is not bankrupt, and AmigaOS is still being updated everyday, just like always.

Basically, there's nothing to see here, move along....:)

Simon

@Dwyloc Quote:
For many years I have been using FolderSync2 on Amiga&PC + FTPMount (Amiga) + FileZilla FTP server on the PC. It's slightly fiddly, but the best solution I found to keep Gigabytes of files synchronised between Amiga & PC.

It's slightly fiddly because FTP doesn't reliably support reading file dates (to 1 sec accuracy), and IIRC impossible to set file dates, so for FolderSync2 to work you must:
1. Run FolderSCAN2 in Scan mode on the PC. This gathers a list of all files (and their file dates), storing them in a special file.
2. Run FolderSync2 on the Amiga. This copies/deletes/renames/moves files as required (on both Amiga & PC).
3. Run FolderSCAN2 in Update mode on the PC. This sets the correct file dates on any new/updated files.

Instead of FTP it would be better to use SmbFS on the Amiga & Window's built-in file sharing, as Step 3 would not be required (while Step 1 would be optional but highly recommend for speed), but since Windows Vista I have been unable to make SmbFS work with Window's built-in file sharing, so I resorted to using FTP instead.

Alternatively, I haven't tried this, but in theory you could run Samba on the Amiga & get Windows to access it via a drive letter, and run FolderSync2 on the PC. However Samba is notoriously tricky to get running on the Amiga.

BTW, when using FolderSCAN2 (at least in Scan mode) it's a very good idea to temporarily disable your virus protection, as otherwise it will run much much slower. This is due to a bug in MinGW that I haven't yet bothered to work-around.

There is an old version of FolderSync2 on my website. I have much more recent private version, so if you run into any problems let me know & I'll send you a more recent version of FolderSync2.

P.S. This is all done over a local network. I would NOT recommend using FTP to share your Window's files over the internet, as it would (1) be very insecure, and (2) very difficult to automate the running of FolderSCAN2.

For a home only system why not just have a central NAS drive and access everything on all devices from one place?

NetFS should allow you to mount the drive on the amiga.

@Severin

Quote:That's my recommendation too.

I use SMBFS and SMBMounter to mount our HomeDisk on all my Amigas during boot. Note, though, that writing to the NAS from AmigaOS is rather slow.

Apart from that it works perfectly.

Best regards,

Niels

@ChrisH

Some sort of ftp sync may still work for remote access for me from Windows, as my Draytek router can be used to created an encrypted VPN connection.

I would probably need to setup sort of dynamic dns system and and a cheep domain name as working directly with IP addresses is a pain, even when your external IP Address does change very often.

@Severin

Quote:

That's what I do. Raspberry Pi shoved under the desk (doing far too many different tasks) with an smbfs connection mounted during boot.

I used to use webdav-handler with MyDrive for transferring files, so that's another option if you really need it in the "cloud" (personally, I prefer to have my data somewhere I can see it, and only use that for temporary storage).

I have mixed Samba Sharing which I can access from Android and Windows (one is a Linux on RPi setup which is also FTP Accessible from AmigaOS and the other is AmigaOS4.1.6+)

I have not run into any problems between Samba and Windows but then I have specifically setup the Samba as an SMB/NMB "master" peer with the Windows taking settings from the Samba Server for encryption and communications compatability modes.

@Chris
I actually have a Raspberry Pi that I am not using for much mounted on the back of the Monitor I have connected to my sam440ep using a vesa mounted case. It sounds like its time to get larger SD card for it and set it up as a ftp server to syncing files between my OS4 systems.

ftp sounds like a good option as its what I used to use to transfer files to and from my non towered A1200 system in the passed as I always found the Amiga ports of samba to be a bit temperamental and I prefer to keep things simple.

@All
Thanks for the helpful idea's.

I am planning to fit a new HD to my sam440ep this week and do my OS4.1FE install.

So it will probably be next weekend at the earliest before I get the chance to try and setup ftp syncing.

I will try and remember and post how I get on here so we can compare notes and other OS4 users can make helpful suggestions and learn from my mistakes

I don't wish to dash anyone's ideas of using FTP with FolderSync2 to synchronise files, but please beware that if you don't use the exact system I outlined then there's a good chance it won't work. Two reasons:

1. You need to run FolderSCAN2 on the system which runs the FTP server. Executables are only available for Windows & Amiga.

2. FTPMount has issues with different FTP implementations. I spent some time trying different FTP servers on Windows before settling on FileZilla.


If you aren't using a Windows system to store the files, then I *strongly* recommend using Samba instead of FTP. It's much better specified, so SmbFS is rather more likely to work correctly, and there is no *need* to use FolderSCAN2 (although it would still help with speed by reducing the time it takes to scan the whole folder).

Probably the old version of FolderSync2 won't work with SmbFS, so I'll need to provide a newer version to anyone wanting to use Samba.