Offsync is a command-line tool to synchronize a local directory with remote ones without having to be connected at the same time to the internet.
Our main purpose is to practice and learn about the Rust programming language and its ecosystem as part of the Rust community in Girona).
After that we didn't find an active experienced Rust developers in Girona to grow the Rust community in Girona, we decided to start a series of meetups to attract more people to Rust. These meetups are mostly focused to people that are new to Rust and want to learn more about it.
We had the first meetup the 4th of December of 2024 and the attendees decided that they want to learn Rust by building a project together.
The second meetup was the 8th of January of 2025 and we chose this project.
The goal is to work in the project in the meetups and in everybody's free time if they feel encouraged. Stay tuned of the future meetups in our lu.ma calendar
We welcome anyone that wants to join us in this project asynchronously or in the meetups and with any level of experience in Rust. People new to Rust will learn, people experienced in Rust will help others, and everybody will have fun and boost the Girona Rust community.
Pep stores historical files (e.g. Holidays photos, finished projects, etc.) in an external disk.
Pep is worried that his disk could fail. He wants to have redundancy in case of failure, but he's worried that if he stores all the disks in the same location, the redundancy won't be useful in case of a disaster (e.g. Fire, flood, etc.). He doesn't need to access the files immediately in case of a disaster.
Pep could use a cloud storage service, but he doesn't want to add that recurrent cost to his budget. He doesn't want to have a device connected 24/7 for this purpose to avoid extra electricity costs and increase his environmental footprint.
Pep doesn't want to have to go to a physical location to sync the disks.
Pep wants to rely on his friends and family to store the disks in their homes. He wants to be able to sync the data changes when he stores them in the disk that he has at home, but he doesn't want to limit those moments with his friends' availability.
Based on the main use case.
Pep stores data in the disk that he has at home. He create copies of them and distribute one copy to a different friend or family member.
Pep stores new files and modified files, and delete files in the disk that he has at home. He
executes offsync. offsync detects the changes and stores them in a configured cloud storage
provider. Because the changes shouldn't take a lot of storage, he uses a free tier of a cloud
storage provider.
Pep's friends and family execute offsync in their homes when they find a convenient time.
offsync finds the changes in the cloud storage provider and sync them in their disks. When
offsync deletes the files in the cloud storage provider when it has synced them and there are not
more locations out of sync.
Because offsync source/destination is a directory, the data can be in a external drive or in the
same computer. His friends and family could potentially use the disk to the same as him and they
could use the disk to store their own data backups, so they could share the cost of the disks and
all of them would have an incentive to execute offsync frequently to keep the changed data in the
cloud storage provider for shorter periods.
The project is in the early stages of development. We want to reach the minimum functionality:
- Synchronize between several locations
- Changes can only happen in one location at a time. The rest must sync before making changes.
- One location can have more than one set of changes before the rest sync.
- All the locations are trusted, so data won't be encrypted.
The current status is to build the basic structure of the project and the basic functionality without a real cloud storage involved. We will use a local directory to simulate the cloud storage. This will lead to a function that doesn't solve the main use case, but we'll establish the base to build the minimum functionality.