How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux | Hacker News Reader

How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux

arstechnica.com

45 pointsapu14 comments

I find the idea of dropbox amazing but I don't think I can bring myself to use it. I realized some time ago that I was moving into a world that I didn't like. I was closing my self off from my data, my services, and turning myself over to the control of others. See http://autonomo.us/ for a blog from this point of view. (Not my own.)

What I would love is to have an open-source dropbox like tool that can be installed on my own personal webserver. Maybe thats a project to consider working on. If my skills extend that far.

Edit: Clarified autonomo.us and fixed a spelling error.

What I would love is to have an open-source dropbox like tool that can be installed on my own personal webserver

its called "git". its trivial to set up a syncing service using any dvcs

He mentioned trying this approach and not being satisfied:

"The sweet penguin juice roaring through my veins commanded me to adopt a needlessly arcane solution, so I started putting all of my article drafts into a private Bazaar repository on my personal web server. Real men use distributed version control systems for everything, right? It was unnecessarily excessive and got cumbersome quickly."

I know what you mean by this but with dropbox you maintain a copy of your files on every computer so I'm not sure I agree that you're handing over control.

That said, I think they could sell a copy of their software (server and client) to companies and make a killing.

I decided, at the end of the day, that I liked efficiency more than I liked control. I really enjoy control and doing it myself, but I only have so many hours in a day. I should direct those hours to ends where I am either more productive and competitive or personally satisfied.

Control is one thing. As far as I can tell, although files are encrypted, DropBox have the encryption keys, which means the encryption isn't particularly effective for protecting my files. I realise that this is necessary for the web frontend to work.

I'd consider using a DropBox-like service with solid encryption all the way through and no (or only a partial) web frontend, but in its current form, I'm not touching it.

Dropbox is easy. It can be used by people that will never use the words 'my' & 'server' in a sentence.

If you need to download it & install it on your own personal webserver, the tool is no longer dropbox-like.

I'm not saying that what you are asking for is unreasonable, it just has very little to do with this.

Congrats to the Dropbox team for garnering such a glowing review on such a prominent tech site!

"seamless sync on Linux"

I wonder if he's tried unison. I've used it for years to keep several mac and linux boxes in sync. It works beautifully and it's open-source.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I repeat, Dropbox is not what I want unless it provides a command that mounts the dropbox somewhere in my filesystem, no nautilus at all.

"On Linux, the parts of the Dropbox client software visible to the end user are implemented as an open source plugin for GNOME's Nautilus file manager."

If you are on KDE and do not care to use Nautilus (I prefer Konqueror myself) then this is not so attractive. Perhaps in time ...

As they put it themselves: "Perhaps maybe write your own command line interface, or a KDE interface."

Directed towards dropbox devs: any chance of letting users specify their own S3 account? I'm a control-freak like that. Sorry if this has been addressed somewhere else, I'm out of the loop. -Paul from dinner with 3 of you in SF 4 months ago at that chinese place that only took cash..

Cheers. Dropboxers.

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