Syncing binary data

#1

Hello,

Thanks a lot for creating Yjs it is an amazing library. My question is:

-is could I use it to sync binary data, e.g. pictures/data files which need to be shared between all clients?

  • What is the best way to do this?
    -Write the binary data into a text field? Up to which file size would this reasonably work?
  • The binary data changes only rarely and it would be ok to sync it completely if it changes

Please excuse if this is a naive question or it has already been answered ( I searched the forum, but could not find an answer).

Thank you!

#2

YJS is probably not the right tool to sync binary data. The benefit of YJS (which comes at significant cost in memory and bandwidth), is the conflict-free merges (i.e. the CRDT part). These are only possible with the existing shared types.

Technically you could base64 encode an image and store it in a simple Y.Array or Y.Map but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. All clients would have to store and sync every version of the image that ever existed.

I would consider storing the images in a separate location (such as on S3) and then use YJS to share hashes/urls.

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#3

Thank you! That is helpful. I will experiment a bit with this.

#4

Or you could just use excellent: https://y-sweet.dev/. It’s a a Yjs server with persistence and auth baked in.

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