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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

Man alive, all I want is a folder that syncs. That's all. I understand that Dropbox is a business and blah blah blah ...

so what are my alternatives if I literally only want:

- a folder that syncs on my devices

- the ability to share a folder with others

- cross-platform

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I'll also vouch for syncthing. It's the best file sharing application. It works cross platform, has windows, linux, android and mac clients.

I can choose to share specific folders for each device. I have one set up on a DO droplet and seamlessly syncs across all my devices.

Also, when two devices are on the same LAN, it discovers the devices automatically.

Couldn't praise it enough!

https://syncthing.net/

I have this running on my personal computer, my work laptop, and my phone. I almost never have any issues, and I can work seamlessly from any device. It's great. I will also use it to share project folders with other people, and again, no serious problems.

SyncThing is great, but the lack of a functional iOS app hurts.

Biggest problem with syncthing is lack of iOS-support.

I agree that is the most significant barrier. There are threads like [1], but like other much-wanted features like Syncthing being able to support untrusted nodes that hold the data, but don't have encryption keys a-la Resilio Sync, progress sometimes comes in spurts and starts.

[1] https://forum.syncthing.net/t/on-syncthing-ios-port-again/89...

I use syncthing and it's fine but it's not bulletproof. Simple sync cases are fine, but when you start having permissions and both sources actively write data, it can lock up and end up in a weird state.

To its credit, you can always resolve the problems with some careful deleting and the occasional permissions kludge.

Maybe something like a self-hosted NextCloud/OwnCloud? Although integration into the operating systems is not as good as with Dropbox, I completely switched to a self-hosted NextCloud and everything works fine without bloat.

+1 on the Nextcloud. It hosts files great and completely replaced Dropbox. It also hosts my Contacts, Calendar, and with Collabra, it is a complete Google Docs replacement too. Like someone else said further down, it also does automatic picture uploads too.

Ah, good to hear that. I still have to look into that to decouple more from Google. Do you have any good resources for more information on how to move contacts and calendar? Or did this work right from the start for you?

It was pretty out of the box friendly. You have to download all of that from google (I recall they have an export function), and it was in a file that nextcloud natively accepts.

Ah, okay. I thought I would need to move them somehow right on my phone. Will have a look into that, thanks!

I've been using Nextcloud for a few years and it's great. The catch is that it's self-hosted so you'll have to get a VPS or have a Raspberry Pi lying around that you want to use for it. Setting up the server takes about 10 minutes if you're a technical user. It's just "sudo snap install Nextcloud" then some additional LetsEncrypt settings if you want SSL. I'll admit it's not a good solution for non-technical users who aren't familiar with the command line.

However, multiple users can use the same server, so you can set it up once and share it with family members. You (the server admin) have full control over your data, so it won't be parsed and collected by third parties. It's also FOSS. There exist sync clients for all desktop and smartphone operating systems as well as a web interface for everything else.

https://nextcloud.com/

Note that their website appears to be down at the moment. Not even "server overloaded" down, but "server not there" down.

They are on GitHub, though: https://github.com/nextcloud

I know that people will frown at this for being Chinese but I really recommend Seafile:

- https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

It's pretty much an open-source version of Dropbox. It works incredibly well, you can host it yourself and does what you expect you to do.

https://www.Sync.com (full disclosure, I work there).

Does it support differential sync? It's the only reason why I'm still using Dropbox.

The Sync apps provide end-to-end encryption, so the entire file is uploaded when it changes. Agreed differential sync can be a good thing, especially with super large files that change often.

For majority of the users delta sync doesn’t bring much benefits . See here https://www.getfilecloud.com/blog/2017/03/myths-and-facts-ab...

Most of the modern files like office documents and pdfs are compressed. Delta Sync only will help in scenarios if you have bitmaps and vm disks.

Unfortunately, it is only partially cross platform (no Linux client) :-(

Sync to a compatible VM or server and then set up rsync?

That could be doable, but requires setting up an always available server in my home and installing Windows on that - not exactly the best of ergonomics

I'm very happy with Tresorit [0]. I used to use Spideroak but switched when their warrant canary got removed.

The big plus for me is end to end encryption. I use it for documents and scans and never felt okay having those in Dropbox.

I also have their cli client running on my Synology NAS so I get a local copy as well as in the cloud.

The only downside, it is a fair bit more pricey when you need a lot of storage.

[0] https://tresorit.com/

I agree, the only "con" I can think of with Tresorit is the price. But I am trying to put my money where my mouth is and pony-up for services which respect my privacy. Quite happy with Tresorit so far.

I use Resilio Sync. It's not free, but was just a one time payment, not a subscription. Works on macOS, Linux, Windows, and they have an iOS app, too.

Sharing with others is possible, but they have to have the app installed to access the files. Resilion Sync doesn't provide any server through which you can download the files, it's all P2P.

I couldn't figure out their licensing or payment model for a team, everything led back to subscriptions and was hideously complicated. We went back to Dropbox because it just worked, no matter how much cruft its taken on.

Yeah, their enterprise offerings are subscription based (per user). I only use it privately.

I second this for personal use For business I have no idea

Keybase. I really wish they would get their act together and let me pay them for the service.

They're very clearly not aiming at being professional, with this trashing focus on random features.

What focus is missing? It works great, only missing feature as GP says is paid upgrade (first 250GB is free 'and always will be').

https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

Introduction of random features instead of things people ask for.

Random features: - Crypto wallets that go on your public profile if you want the alert to shut up - Git. I mean, would you trust a production repo to magic crypto remote relying on a third party service that has no SLAs? - We're kind of Slack/Mattermost/Discord now but with none of the accessability or SLA offerings and you need one or the other to have an audience besides "tech nerds" who are already fragmented on 20+ platforms and clearly just needed one more

Things people want: - An app that is less entitled and forces focus over everything. Games, your presentation, everything, it doesn't care. - Dark mode? Literally the highest voted thing and it took them 2 years to start working on it. - Seamless mobile notifications. Signal can show content while maintaining strong crypto, why does Keybase just show '<person> sent you a message'. That is super annoying if you want to use Keybase for an actual team. - Random reliability issues and nobody seems to care about them with any sense of urgency.

It's okay to be run like a hobby, to move fast and break shit and pay no attention to polishing the experience. But then don't be surprised if nobody seriously uses your product.

They're really looking like they've got laser focus on file sync with their crypto wallet support and random crap coin giveaways

I've used Keybase for file sync/backup—though not extensively.

In spite of all of those other points, I've found the sync does work pretty seamlessly if you just need 1:1 sync and limited special features. That suits me well enough.

Definitely not 1:1 sync.

They're not even saving metadata which is available on all filesystems such as timestamps etc.

Oh interesting. I guess I assumed too much. To be fair, my main interest was in the content so it served me fine but for more complex workflows or needs that would be debilitating.

Seconded. I still cannot find a decent alternative, if I add

- not self-hosted, but hosted by someone big enough to have a decent security team.

I don't want to take care of the security of this myself, nor do I want to rely on some mostly unknown 3 people startup.

Hetzner sells hosted nextcloud. Not sure if the security team is absolutely top notch, but they are no 3 people startup neither.

Thank you, I searched for Nextcloud hosting before, but I did not find Hetzner

the only downside I found was that they don't (or didn't) allow custom domains (so cloud.yourdomain.com won't work)

I use Dropbox and just not paper

rsync - https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync

I am having trouble finding the original "Show HN" for Dropbox but I recall people just calling it, more or less, "rsync with a web GUI."

Taking it one step further, you could use rclone (https://rclone.org/) which is like rsync but adds the functionality of syncing files with different cloud storage providers.

It has been on my TODO list to setup rclone with Nuage as the front end (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage) so I can have a Dropbox-like interface with org-mode text file rendering on the go.

It doesn't have "Show HN" in the title, but here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I B2 with Rclone:

https://rclone.org/b2

I have a Synology NAS with their "Synology Drive" software. The UI polish isn't great, but the functionality has been solid in my experience. Bonus points for keeping my data entirely local aside from the dynamic DNS piece to connect in remotely.

Paper is a separate product.

Box? Or is that even too heavy for your tastes, given that they've been adding "features" to their product too.

Syncthing. No cloud part though.

Does any viable open-source option exist that could be self-hosted?

Nextcloud. Has windows, Linux and iOS clients.

Also integrates with Files on iOS, and has camera-upload which works better than Dropbox.

Best switch I ever made.

Thanks. I just tried the demo, but it's not working in Firefox 69.0 at all. It loads, but nothing works.

https://imgur.com/a/w8cyFWf

Weird. Don’t have any issues like that in my setup, but I can see not having a working demo to judge a product by makes it hard to commit.

Works for me, though, for what it’s worth.

No worries. I know my office blocks a lot of traffic and has some other rules baked in so I wonder if that’s the case here.

Thanks for the recommendation though.

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