We actually DO use it somewhat like NFS. Our molecular biologists write code on their laptops in a folder which is synced with a folder on our large server.
Most of time they run things locally, but if they need a lot of computing power then they can log into the cluster server and run things there. And results will be synced back to their laptops. Yes, there's a small lag in replication, but it's just a few seconds usually.
I'd argue that this is a superior solution to using NFS.
Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
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following your logic, git is a better filesystem that NFS or dropbox because it provides version control features.
but I don't think that any of the git developers would take you seriously if you started saying that git was a replacement for NFS.
Although, in some workflows (like yours), git would probably work at least as well as dropbox
you are using dropbox to archive data and to access that archive from multiple places.
that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone
Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:27 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Yes, git would be great for these kind of tasks if it could do fast automatic replication. I've tried to move our scientists to git, but they resist. Indeed, DropBox works just fine for them - they don't need to do explicit commits, pushes and pulls. You just change a file and it's changed on the server.
Oh, and they're using rsnapshot for backups. So git's ability to store history is not really a selling point.
>that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage
As I see it, there are several main reasons for remote storage:
1) To be able to access large storage. It's not really a problem now when a typical notebook has more space than a SAN 20 years ago.
2) To share something. Dropbox works just fine for it in most cases when you don't need locking and sub-millisecond coherency.
3) To access archived data.
So DropBox works great for a lot of people simply because it doesn't try to do everything.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone
Posted Jun 24, 2012 6:20 UTC (Sun) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870)
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