Technology Kills The life and times of Ben McClure

SugarSync’s Bitter Aftertaste

Update from 3/17/2010: SharpCast noticed my blog post and has committed to resolving my issues. The jury is still out, because nothing has been resolved yet; however I am hopeful that this means a fix will be on the way. See the bottom of this post for more information.

I was very stoked about SugarSync when I found it originally. In fact, I'm still in love with the features, and the entire service looks great on paper and works great at first glance.

Since then, however, I have discovered that I spend more time managing my sync folders than I do actually using my synced files--and not by choice.

There are several areas in which SugarSync has proven frustrating and I feel really needs to be changed/updated:

• When it says "All files are backed up and in sync" this is not necessarily the case. Often you will find files from another machine are missing on the current one. The folder is "in sync" according to SugarSync but obviously not in reality. This is a false sense of security and leads me to the next point.
• When files are not truly in sync (No matter whether it says they are or not), changing that file on any other system causes the file to be renamed, having text appended to the name (such as "From Work Laptop - 2"). SugarSync is trying to be smart here by not allowing you to overwrite a file that might not be in sync. What really happens, however, is you usually end up in a position where you have several revisions of a file with text appended to them, but the original file is nowhere to be found. Putting something where the original file was causes it to be renamed. And this all occurs silently with no notification to the user and no indication that the files they are saving are being saved under a different name.
• Many times I will delete a folder (while SugarSync is running, and I can verify it was deleted in SugarSync as well), and the next day I realize that that folder has synced back down to all my machines again. The only way to avoid this is to permanently delete the folder, making the "Deleted Items" bin useless.
• On one out of my two systems, every time I close SugarSync and re-open it (such as when rebooting), it acts like the first time I started it, making me log in and doing a full check of all of my sync folders again from scratch. This takes a large amount of time, and thus far SharpCast has not been able to resolve the issue for me. This is not nearly as bad as the above issues, however, and I do have faith that SC will be able to assist me with this one eventually.

But those first two points essentially make a sync service such as this unusable.

• You have to make sure everything you have is backed up somewhere else, just in case SugarSync loses it or it disappears from your sync folder.
• You'll often update a file only to find that you can't--it always gets saved with a new filename. The only solution is to go to My SugarSync in a web browser, rename or delete the original file, then rename the newest revision back to the original name.
• I've even gone so far as to create an AutoHotKey script which searches all of my sync folders for files that have been automatically renamed and prints out a list of them each day that I have to go back and fix. This is usually at least 40 or 50 files per day that have this happen--sometimes it is far more. No matter how many it is, it's annoying and it's too much to ask your users to do to keep their files in sync.

At this point, I would almost be better off doing it all manually. I want to love SugarSync--I want to be able to trust SharpCast with my data. But they need to first prove to me they can do a better job than this.

I will of course continue to post updates as any of these issues get resolved or at least have progress made on them.

In the meantime--has anyone had any good experiences with other online syncing services? I like DropBox but can't make full use of it because of its limitation of only working within the My Dropbox folder.

A quick scenario for you:  Today I started my laptop when I got to work. SugarSync made me log in again and re-scanned all of my folders. After that 30-40 minutes, when SugarSync said everything was in sync, I opened up SharpDevelop and worked on one of my synced projects. Everything went great, until I went to build my source code. SharpDevelop told me neither of the required solution files existed.

Sure enough, I checked the directory, and SugarSync deleted the Solution file from my local machine, and each one I saved was renamed, appended with a "(From Work Laptop - 2)" (or 3, 4, etc). I then noticed almost every class I was just working on had the same problem. 10 minutes later when I finished renaming everything on My SugarSync online, I tried to build again, and it started doing the same thing over again!

If they cannot fix this behavior, at least show a dialog asking the user whether to rename the file or overwrite, risking losing any changes made on other machines. This is getting very frustrating!

Update Information from 3/17/2010

Shortly after my blog posting, SharpCast responded indicating they read my post and want to help me resolve my issues. I sent them a full application log/audit, and they responded today with the following message:

"Hi Ben,

We are working with our Engineering department to find a solution to your problem. I will update you as soon as I can."

My fingers are crossed, and I'm just itching to put it through its paces once they indicate the problem should be resolved. I will be sure to update this post, or make another one, when we get further along with this issue.

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