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+---
+title: Using Digitalocean Spaces to sync between computers
+url: digitalocean-spaces-to-sync-between-computers.html
+date: 2020-09-09T12:00:00+02:00
+type: post
+draft: false
+---
+
+I've been using [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/) for probably **10+ years**
+now and I-ve became so used to it that it runs in the background that I don't
+even imagine a world without it. But it's not without problems.
+
+At first I had problems with `.venv` environments for Python and the only
+solution for excluding synchronization for this folder was to manually exclude a
+specific folder which is not really scalable. FYI, my whole project folder is
+synced on [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/). This of course introduced a lot
+of syncing of files and folders that are not needed or even break things on
+other machines. In the case of **Python**, I couldn't use that on my second
+machine. I needed to delete `.venv` folder and pip it again which synced files
+again to the main machine. This was very frustrating. **Nodejs** handles this
+much nicer and I can just run the scripts without deleting `node_modules` again
+and reinstalling. However, `node_modules` is a beast of its own. It creates so
+many files that OS has a problem counting them when you check the folder
+contents for size.
+
+I wanted something similar to Dropbox. I could without the instant syncing but
+it would need to be fast and had the option for me to exclude folders like
+`node_modules, .venv, .git` and folders like that.
+
+I went on a hunt for an alternative to [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/) 
+and found:
+
+- [Tresorit](https://tresorit.com/)
+- [Sync.com](https://sync.com)
+- [Box](https://www.box.com/)
+
+You know, the usual list of suspects. I didn't include [Google
+drive](https://drive.google.com) or [One drive](https://onedrive.live.com/)
+since they are even more draconian than Dropbox.
+
+> All this does not stem from me being paranoid but recently these companies 
+> have became more and more aggressive and they keep violating our privacy when 
+> they share our data with 3rd party services. It is getting out of control.
+
+So, my main problem was still there. No way of excluding a specific folder from
+syncing. And before we go into "*But you have git, isn't that enough?*", I must
+say, that many of the files (PDFs, spreadsheets, etc) I have in a `git` repo
+don't get pushed upstream to Git and I still want to have them synced across my
+computers.
+
+I initially wanted to use [rsync](https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync) but I would
+need to then have a remote VPS or transfer between my computers directly.  I
+wanted a solution where all my files could be accessible to me without my
+machine.
+
+> **WARNING: This solution will cost you money!** DigitalOcean Spaces are $5 per
+month and there are some bandwidth limitations and if you go beyond that you get
+billed additionally.
+
+Then I remembered that I could use something like
+[S3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3) since it has versioning and is
+fully managed. I didn't want to go down the AWS rabbit hole with this so I
+choose [DigitalOcean Spaces](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/).
+
+Then I needed a command-line tool to sync between source and target. I found
+this nice tool [s3cmd](https://s3tools.org/s3cmd) and it is in the Ubuntu
+repositories.
+
+```bash
+sudo apt install s3cmd
+```
+
+After installation will I create a new Space bucket on DigitalOcean. Remember
+the zone you will choose because you will need it when you will configure
+`s3cmd`.
+
+Then I visited [Digitalocean Applications &
+API](https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens) and generated **Spaces
+access keys**. Save both key and secret somewhere safe because when you will
+leave the page secret will not be available anymore to you and you will need to
+re-generate it.
+
+```bash
+# enter your key and secret and correct endpoint
+# my endpoint is ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com because
+# I created my bucket in Amsterdam regiin
+s3cmd --configure
+```
+
+After that I played around with options for `s3cmd` and got to the following
+command.
+
+```bash
+# I executed this command from my projects folder
+cd projects
+s3cmd sync --delete-removed --exclude 'node_modules/*' --exclude '.git/*' --exclude '.venv/*' ./ s3://my-bucket-name/projects/
+```
+
+When syncing int he other direction you will need to change the order of the 
+`SOURCE` and `TARGET` to `s3://my-bucket-name/projects/` and `./`.
+
+> Be sure that all the paths have trailing slash so that sync knows that this 
+> are directories.
+
+I am planning to implement some sort of a `.ignore` file that will enable me to
+have a project-specific exclude options.
+
+I am currently running this every hour as a cronjob which is perfectly fine for
+now when I am testing how this whole thing works and how it all will turn out.
+
+I have also created a small Gnome extension which is still very unstable, but
+when/if this whole experiment pays of I will share on Github.