Connect remoteStorage to my Dropbox?

I have installed Litewrite on my Firefox OS phone. It supports connection to remote storage. Newbie question: What’s an easy way to get the notes from Litewrite into my Dropbox?

Thoughts:

  • I have an Amazon EC2 server running 24/7, with Amazon Linux AMI (based on CentOS). I assume I could install a remoteStorate server on that machine, and then simply target the Litewrite notes to the Dropbox directory, from where the Dropbox client picks them up.

    Disadvantage: Running an additional public service on that server could cause security issues, especially as I don’t update that server every day. Currently, the only service visible from outside is SSH. However, I also have another server, which I use for hosting web applications. Perhaps it’s better to use that for running a remoteStorage. I could then set up a separate Dropbox account, which shares data with my main account.

  • I have set up a 5apps Storage account and linked Litewrite to it. If it would be possible to sync Dropbox with that account, then this could be an interesting option.

First the good news: we’re working on native Dropbox support in the library that Litewrite uses to implement remoteStorage. The bad: it’s still experimental, which is why it’s not used in Litewrite yet.

As you say, the other option would be to sync remoteStorage to a local directory and sync that with Dropbox. Someone wants started writing a backup tool that downloads all your storage, and in theory that’s pretty easy to do. I don’t know where that is currently, though. Maybe someone else can help with this?

The question with syncing the notes data to your Dropbox, though, is this: does it help you to have a bunch of notes named with IDs as filenames in JSON format on your Dropbox? The whole idea of remoteStorage is that you use remoteStorage-capable apps to open the notes and different apps can use the same data format.

If it’s merely for backing up your notes, there’s also a backup app that @michielbdejong was working on. Maybe you can say sth about that option, Michiel?

Hope this helps a little bit!

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How would it work? Could you edit a file in Dropbox, and the edits would show up in Litewrite? How would the files be named?

I ask because you mention: “does it help you to have a bunch of notes named with IDs as filenames in JSON format on your Dropbox? The whole idea of remoteStorage is that you use remoteStorage-capable apps to open the notes and different apps can use the same data format.”

Someone [once] started writing a backup tool that downloads all your storage, and in theory that’s pretty easy to do.

A tool for backing up remoteStorage data to the local file system would be great to have! It’s certainly better than nothing, especially if two-way-sync conceptually makes no sense.

For exporting files one-by-one, there is https://export.5apps.com/

It would indeed very easy (literally like 20 lines of code, probably) to write an app that:

  • takes all your data and lets you download it as a zip file,
  • takes a zip file and lets you upload all the files from that.

With that combination, you can do all the backups and migrations you may ever need to do.

Actually, I think it would be fun to work on that this saturday at http://lanyrd.com/2014/remotestorage/

Even so, it’s true that Litewrite stores its documents in JSON documents, and not just plain text files.

Interesting, though it seems a bit unstable: If not clicking the right things in the right order, then export.5apps.com crashes with errors in Chrome’s developer console. When I finally was able to see /documents/ and clicked on it, I got:

Possibly uncaught error:  ["cannot fulfill maxAge requirement - remote is not connected"] 

It would indeed very easy (literally like 20 lines of code, probably) to write an app that:

takes all your data and lets you download it as a zip file,
takes a zip file and lets you upload all the files from that.

I actually prefer an uncompressed daily (cron) backup of the JSON files to my home directory. Uncompressed data works better with the daily incremental backup of my home directory.

http://lanyrd.com/2014/remotestorage/

Looks like fun, but I’m not in Berlin these days.