DVCS-Autosync: A personal Dropbox replacement based on Git
mayrhofer.eu.org
mayrhofer.eu.org
Media storage is, I believe, a common Dropbox use case. And Dropbox's transparent uploads, which seem to automatically detect and throttle when I am using bandwidth, are a great feature that I haven't seen in any open-source competitor.
Also, one of my favorite applications of Dropbox is having all of our important documents in one central location (whether this is a wise move or not... ). This makes accessing documents on the fly from my iPhone a breeze. Having media files in there as well, would, I think destroy my antique iPhone 3G!
You are right on the money about the background uploading though.
The iPhone app doesn't sync everything - it will download (and separately, cache) only the files you request.
the 'append only' nature of git makes it unsuitable for this application imo. a sliding expiration/history window size depending on avilable resources is ideal
And then, besides all that, the major problem with committing blobs to git is that git will store the blob once for each (potentially small) revision that you make. That's not space efficient, but the git community knows about it, and is actively trying to fix it.
a cursory search for patents in this area turned up all sorts. it's a horrific mess of overlapping remote file sync patents out there. Try this, for example: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/about?id=UTJ7AAAAEBAJ&dq... or this: http://www.google.co.uk/patents?id=dlXPAAAAEBAJ
There are pages and pages of published patents/patent apps in this domain.
Will such infringement (stealing! piracy! theft!) be tolerated?