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Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, after the last year and a half, anything that wants root access, that is not open source, is out. Now, being open source does not make that automatically safe but it is a step in the right direction. Dropbox, MS Office, etc, are closed source tools that puts too much at stake.

Granted my team is small, but we just uninstalled dropbox today. Going to use the web interface and look for another solution in the meantime.

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I'd love to hear what you find. My research has shown that Dropbox is mostly the only sync service supported in mobile apps. iCloud is next. After that it's very rare to see any other integration.

I'd love to see Box or someone else encourage popular apps to support their sync platforms, but I doubt it will happen. I blame Apple for not supporting easy 3rd party integrations.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega a few years ago and they now have mobile apps, sync clients for multiple operating systems and decent browser extensions in addition to a more generous storage allowance. There is also the added benefit of encryption. So far I remain impressed with their service.

I switched from Dropbox to Mega

Really?

FWIW Kim Dotcom, the founder of Mega, has distanced himself from it, saying the company had "suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud"[1]

So yeah, don't trust Dropbox. Instead trust some shady Chinese characters. Can you name one of them? In comparison, note that Ben Newhouse, a Dropbox employee, is actually posting in this discussion.

There is also the added benefit of encryption

Without full source code to said encryption, all you have to go on is "trust us".

Forced to choose between the two, I know who I'd trust, and it wouldn't be Mega. YMMV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_(service)

Luckily, there's third party clients that are open source for Mega.

And they're actually usable.

> Instead trust some shady Chinese characters.

What does Chinese have to do with this?

I have no idea what Dropbox actually is or does (I'm FOSS-only, at home and at work), I've only heard of it, so I may be way off the mark.

With that said, on the assumption that it is a way to exchange files between computers and/or share with other users, it would seem to be the case that ownCloud (nextCloud) fits the bill. You can host it yourself (as I do) or use a third party to host it for you. I have been using it for a number of years and I'm entirely happy with it.

Also, depending on your use scenario, another possible option may be https://www.stackfield.com/ a German end-to-end encrypted storage company. I believe there are others offering similar services.

Seafile (https://www.seafile.com) and ownCloud (https://owncloud.org) both are open source and have mobile apps. Worth checking!

for synching between devices I use BT-Sync, now Sync.. closed source but reliable as a background daemon not needing intervention

box.com as well. We have free accounts, hipaa/gov grade encryption and security, and lots of collaboration options. :)

Have you tried StorageMadeEasy.com ? Connects to dropbox and other clouds too.

But it isn't open source.

Mac OS X is a mostly closed source operating system so I don't understand why you are drawing the line with third parties.

I suspect many would like to run something more open than OS X/macOS, but because of the alternatives, it's just not viable for business purposes not to, according to what their needs are. I know that is the situation for me.

Apple has shown itself to be trustworthy.

Dropbox has done the opposite.

Try SyncThing. It's cross-platform (written in Go), fast and secure (BitTorrent Sync style, but open-source).

I use it, but there's no iOS solution so I can't use it for a number of things.

BT-Sync is the original of syncthing with iOS-support but considered bad because its closed source and comercial

I like it though

I don't use BT Sync because if I'm on my local university network they block BitTorrent. It's not a big deal since I've graduated, but I still go there and use the library and meet with people so it would be inconvenient.

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