Posted March 29th, 2009 @ 11:50am by Erik J. Barzeski
Why on earth is my iDisk so freakin' slow. Isn't it just a .dmg on my disk that's automatically synced with cloud? Why do operations like copying a file to it or writing a file to it take so bloody long?
And why is this still an issue?
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Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:46am #
I'm trying my luck with Dropbox now. We'll see how this solution will work at the end. For now I don't like that they don't sync xattrs. The Dropbox application crashed four times during my initial sync (about 11 gigs), too. So that's another minus point.
Dropbox seems to be faster at all, but now I'm seeing weird slow transfer speeds (I'm already used to it with the iDisk). The Dropbox application seems to need a couple of seconds / minutes after it starts, to start doing something. Possibly I'm too paranoid, but this whole thing doesn't seem to be very safe - the iDisk isn't either. I've seen lost files on my iDisk in some archived folders I didn't look into since a couple of months, but I needed the data at the given time.
My next point: I don't understand what algorithms these file synchronization tools use. FileSyncAgent and Dropbox eat more than 100% of my CPU and I don't like it. I already thought about setting up a custom solution with a VCS, but I know that these aren't so good in handling binary files.
With added sync it seems that you have two problems more: inconsistent data and failing sync mechanisms.
Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:08am #
[quote comment="53639"]I'm trying my luck with Dropbox now.[/quote]
FWIW, I've been happy with my free DropBox account (I don't tax it very much).
I was using my iDisk when I wrote this because DropBox doesn't have the "we show web pages" functionality, and I was working on files in the Web directory (here).
Posted 07 Apr 2009 at 5:15pm #
iDisk is brain damaged. Slow, dimwitted and uncooperative. I recently made the mistake of trying to upload a video to my iDisk for a prospective client last week and had no success. (If it had worked, I would then perhaps experience the joy of having my customer be unable to download it, another common experience.) It reminds me why I haven't used it for years, which in turn reminds me of why I am paying so much for this POS I can never use. Apple can do much better than this, I wish they'd just try.
Posted 03 May 2009 at 8:18am #
I hear a lot of negative comments about iDisk. I've been using iDisk sync'd to MobileMe for a long time (~2+ years?) with very few issues.
I've never lost a file.
I've shared pictures, movies and data files in both the public and shared folders without incident - even with Windows users (public folder).
Sync'ing occasionally runs slow but most of the time I don't even know its there.
More frequently it complains that the administrative file (I forget what its called) can't be sync'd.
I've needed to teach users to close files so that sync can occur properly. (You actually need to close MS Office apps because they hold onto files (or file handles maybe?) even after they've been closed.)
I've needed to teach users to choose "Sync Now" to upload a newly modified file immediately.
I can't find a pattern to indicate why others have trouble while I don't.
FWIW