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synchronise in cloud

luke1970
luke1970 Junior Member ✭
edited January 2012 in 1Password 3 for Mac
Morning,



1Password support Dropbox at this time. Why only dropbox?

It's a problem to sync 1Password database in any cloud like iCloud or Lacie Wuala [url="http://www.wuala.com/"]http://www.wuala.com/[/url] ?



Greetings, Bernd
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Comments

  • khad
    khad Social Choreographer ✭
    edited January 2012
    Thanks for asking about this, Bernd. It is a great question.



    Dropbox does two things that no other system (yet) does. It provides the necessary programming tools (APIs) for all of the platforms that we support: OS X, Windows, iOS, Android, and Windows 7 Phone; and it provides syncing to truly native filesystems on the Mac and PC.



    The short answer to “Have you considered X as an alternative sync solution” is “Yes” for every value of X that people have asked about. We have considered them, and have had to reject them for various technical reasons.



    Each item in your 1Password data is stored in its own, separate, file. This is great for syncing in that it means that only the changes need to sync and this can be done by file and folder syncing. This not only makes syncing faster and cheaper, it also makes it much more reliable and robust against potential data corruption. But this also means that 1Password needs to read lots of different files quickly as it runs. Dropbox does fast syncing while storing the local files on the native local file systems, allowing it to function properly.



    As an illustration, an alternative such as WebDAV (which we worked on extensively but had to abandon before we moved to Dropbox) provides a file system abstraction layer that is just too slow for 1Password. It can hang when we try to access some file that it hasn’t cached properly. Also WebDAV isn’t designed for updating many files is quick succession. It’s not that WebDAV is bad, but it isn’t suitable for how we would use it.



    Everything else we’ve looked at (and we have looked at many things) suffers not only from the same problems we saw with WebDAV, but they also lack usable APIs for all the platforms we need to support. It may be possible, for example, to sync data to an Android or iOS device using SugarSync or Wuala, but it isn’t possible to sync that data in a way that would make it available to 1Password on those devices.



    As for iCloud, we are as excited about iCloud as you are! We have started looking into iCloud and how it might benefit our users. For now though, we're going to wait to announce any new features until they're ready to be released.



    When we have more news we will be posting it on our blog, on Twitter, and in the newsletter:



    [url="http://blog.agilebits.com"]http://blog.agilebits.com[/url]

    [url="http://twitter.com/1Password"]http://twitter.com/1Password[/url]

    [url="http://agilebits.com/company/newsletter"]http://agilebits.com...pany/newsletter[/url]



    Please keep an eye on these resources for more information.
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