Emacs cloud storage options?

Question

What options are there for saving and retrieving documents to and from the cloud, from within Emacs?

I use Emacs at work, on a Windows machine, and at home, on a Linux box, so ideally I would want a solution that works more or less out of the box for both operating systems.

I touched on g-client, but could not quite get it to work. Obviously, if there are no other, simpler options, I'm just going to have to spend a couple of more hours on it.

Many thanks, Andreas

Transpierce

Answer 1

Two options that I can think of:

1. If you have access to a server somewhere that runs ssh, then use ssh with tramp. You can also run a ssh server at your home linux box and access your home files through from work. Tramp works perfectly fine on Windows with ssh from cygwin. It will automatically grab a file (provided that you give emacs something like /ssh:yourusername@yourserverhost:~/yourfile), put it to a temporary file at your computer, then copy it back to the host when you save it.

2. Use a source control system like SVN or Git. Again you can host the server at your home or you can find online hosts (most are for open source and are thus public, but some are free and private; I use unfuddle.com). You would have to regularly commit/update, but you can easily automate that if you want, and the source control system gives you a nice history of your files and a safety net in case you did something very wrong.

Emacs has excellent integration with source control system. If you find the build-in one not sufficient (it is quite generic and thus does not offer interface to some specific features of a particular source control system), there are plenty of good alternative (psvn for SVN, and magit for Git, for example).

Spiller

I used to have a SSH server running from home, then it crashed and I realised I needed to cloud it. After viewing a video and reading a few tutorials last night, I decided to go for Git. Thanks! – Transpierce

Answer 2

Dropbox is pretty universal. I store even my Emacs config files there. Works on Windows, Linux, OS X, and iPhone. Syncs automatically. Stores history. Is free. What else do you want?:-)

Fulford

Thanks Joonas, how possible is it to integrate Dropbox into Emacs? I want to M-x save-to-cloud. – Transpierce

Dropbox creates a special directory called "Dropbox". Everything you save in there syncs with the cloud. To store config files there, just create symlinks from where they're supposed be to the Dropbox folder. So with Emacs, just C-x C-s, and your file is in the cloud. Maybe I sound like an advertisement, but Dropbox is the best thing since sliced bread. – Fulford

It does seem useful, but I'm not sure I like having to download the client. I will download it though, as it seems like the best option so far. Maybe I'm being utopian, but it would be nice with a REST interface where I can PUT and GET files, with a .el to handle the HTTP requests. I might just end up building it myself and make shedloads of money :) – Transpierce

Answer 3

sshfs, if you have good connection speed.

Otherwise there's always tramp-mode for Emacs.

Edit: Just saw you are using Windows.

It's been some years since I used Windows as my desktop, but I used WebDrive back then. It sort-of works, although it always was a bit unstable.

Lumpen

Answer 4

Emacs has great support for remote file systems via Tramp. So the real question is what should you use as a remote FS. There are a bunch of them and as long as they have a way of mounting them or logging in via ssh (for Tramp) you should be ok.

I use JungleDisk - works great for Windows, Linux and Mac. Starts around $2 per month and there's a cap of around $90 per year. You can back up to S3 or to Rackspace.

It integrates at the file system level so you can either read/write directly to it or create links from it to your local file system. I use that to share my .emacs, .bash etc between multiple machines.

Chris

Luminance