backer idea

@dominictarr @hij1nx

Hey,

so I got frustrated about dropbox being a centralized service and bittorrent sync being closed source and not working on SmartOS.

=> Since dominic talked about this before, let's write a distributed backup / file mirroring tool!

I'm laying out some of the base ideas and collecting useful resources, deciding on the feature set etc.

What do you guys think?

Sep 17 '13 06:09 juliangruber

adding @maxogden for his experience with binary data and leveldb, and cat taming skills

Sep 17 '13 07:09 juliangruber

removed you guys as collaborators again, please tell me if you want to be one. Just realized that I don't like when other just insert me into their repos :D

Sep 17 '13 07:09 juliangruber

I think we need a cross platform menubar application container thingy that runs node + a web app UI when you click on the menu bar icon, e.g how dropbox does it but npm installable.

screen shot 2013-09-17 at 9 44 03 am

Sep 17 '13 07:09 max-mapper

good idea, we could probably get some heads up from the cloudup guys since they've built that, although they're not shipping via npm

Sep 17 '13 07:09 juliangruber

You could use node-webkit for a tray icon, though only using the system default menus on OSX until someone fixes this issue. @shama just published an npm-installable wrapper pretty much a day ago, too.

Sep 17 '13 09:09 hughsk

I attempted this before, and then gave up, but that was in jan, and can do much better now. https://github.com/dominictarr/nodedrop

Also, I made this on sunday: https://github.com/dominictarr/merkle

Am getting much better at this stuff, so we will probably have the skills to build this soon.

Sep 17 '13 10:09 dominictarr

thanks a lot @hughsk @dominictarr, added all of that to the readme. Do you by chance know people that would would be a great fit to contribute?

Sep 17 '13 12:09 juliangruber

Can I help with html and css?

Sep 17 '13 12:09 ghost

@joelcipriano yes! :) we'll need that for sure for the

public facing website
menu bar app

and maybe for the webapp version the user hosts himself or on his server.

@StarBurst1977 mentioned he'd also like to help out and can do design/html/css, so you can bounce idea off each other!

Sep 17 '13 12:09 juliangruber

I'd like to help with this. I've been diving into node-webkit and fixing that tray issue is high on my list.

Sep 17 '13 14:09 shama

Also keen to help out with the frontend and appification :)

Sep 17 '13 16:09 hughsk

Ok. Can we split @StarBurst1977? You, design. Me, html & css?

Sep 17 '13 16:09 ghost

re webapp: https://github.com/juliangruber/backer-frontend/issues/1

Sep 17 '13 16:09 juliangruber