firesync

I finally got around to creating firesync, a file synchronization utility. I’ve been using (and testing) it over the past few days and so far I’m really happy with how it’s turned out.

I previously messed around with file synchronization when I created Doppler. Dopper didn’t quite live up to my expectations. It’s architecture and functionality was overly complex, and the result was a fairly unstable and bug-ridden piece of software. In contrast, firesync has a much simpler, or I guess I should say more structured, architecture, similar functionality, and is much more stable and usable.

One of my goals for Doppler that didn’t translate over to firesync was the idea that files should automatically be sync’d and, at the same time, the application should remain invisible and not interrupt the user’s workflow. The way I attempted to do this in Doppler was to compute an md5 checksum of the file and compare it to a checksum computed earlier (that was stored in memory). Putting the thread responsible for this to sleep for a few ms after a checksum was computed was my way of trying to maintain low CPU usage. However, there are 2 major problems with this approach. The first is that computing checksums require reading a ton of data off the hard drive and there was a very large and very noticable slow down in system performance (since the cache gets changed because your jumping around the disk computing checksums). The second problem with this approach is that even for a handful of files, it takes an increadibly long time before all the files are sync’d since the thread is going to sleep so much in order to keep CPU usage low.

firesync doesn’t compute checksums and only uses the file’s last modification date/time to figure out if one file is older than another. I was actually surprised at how fast I was able to get the last modification date/time, as well as other file attributes, (it looks like windows caches them) and it makes the sync operation very fast. In addition I threw the idea of automatic sync’ing and, consequently, low CPU usage out the window. However, given how fast you can get the last modification date/time, automatic file sync’ing might be something fun to try in the future.

Anyway, so far I’m really happy with firesync in almost every respect – interface, functionality, performance, etc. and I’m considering taking the lessons I’ve learned and doing a new backup utility, as Shoebox Backup hasn’t quite lived up to my expectations either; but that’s a while away, it’s back to game development work for now.

oh, and of course, a screen shot…