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Comment by jhasse | Hacker News Reader

> Both of them doing that in mandatory fashion is unacceptable.

Don't install their apps then. There are lots of alternatives out there.

So, what is a good alternative to Dropbox that supports LAN sync, block-level uploads [1], revisions, and that most of my colleagues, friends and friends have or can set up?

If you actually look at the competition, most of them do not have LAN sync or block sync (OneDrive, Google Drive), they do not have proper support for revisions (Resilio Sync), or are hard to set up for most people (Syncthing).

[1] So that if I change a small piece of a large file, it does not upload the complete file again.

There is probably no product with the exact feature set of Dropbox. But if you want to take the principled stand, you'll have to live with that. You can't be all "refuse closed-source autoupdating software, it is evil! Richard Stallman was right all along!" and then complain about you not getting the features that those products offer. That's the price you pay for your principles.

Seafile works pretty well, they install a client a lot like the Dropbox client and sync away. And it is even mostly open source

seafile.com

https://github.com/haiwen/seafile

Why only "mostly"?

I believe that some of the `pro` or their custom hosted offering's features aren't necessary in the open source code base. But the majority of the functionality is

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