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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

The selling point of Dropbox/Google Drive isn't the storage itself, but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced.

So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.

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On the other hand when a Dropbox user shares a file with you these days, the nudges have so gotten out of hand that it's a pain to use.

That’s only an issue if you use Dropbox for sharing with non-Dropbox users, rather than for syncing files across devices and accounts, and having an extra versioned copy in the cloud.

And your point is... everyone should have Dropbox?

I'm pretty sure their point is Dropbox is better as personal storage than file sharing between users.

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

There are other less annoying alternatives such as WeTransfer.

https://syncthing.net/ <- like this :)

Free, opensource, works on computers and phones, can in most cases puncture nat, supports local discovery (lan, multicast).

No googles, no dropboxes, no clouds, no AI training, no "my kid likes the wrong video on youtube, now our whole family lost access to every google account we had, so we lost everything, including family photos", just sync!

(not affiliated, just really love the software)

This is my go to solution for code sync across macOS laptop, Windows VMs, and Linux VMs to build and run/debug across environments. Unless something has changed, exclusions of build artifacts was always an issue with cloud sync providers. I have been doing more cross compilation on macOS, copy and run on those other machines lately for prototypes, but for IDE based debugging it’s great to edit local or remote and get it all synced to the machine to run it in seconds.

The only issue I have, with this amazing piece of software that I heavily use across multiple devices, is management of sync failures and exclusions via the UI. I have been using it for long enough to know the tips and tricks but it would be great for the web UI to allow easy management of conflict issues and the ability to mark files/folders as exclusions in a friendly manner.

Sadly it doesn't have a great official solution for mobile devices.

The problem with syncthing is that you need to download the whole folder to your device. Google drive is "streaming"

Have a look at Seafile's SeaDrive client for that.

Mind, I haven't actually used it in anger, as I prefer full file sync vs on-demand.

How's that a problem? The tool has "sync" in its name. It's a feature.

Right - you pay for the GUI and the well-balanced user experience. It's less about, strictly speaking, the storage.

Which is, in the end, true of a lot of tools where the underlying 'things' aren't particularly spectacular but rather it's the user experience that sells it

We can just all use rsync, no need for an app.

Yep, I use rsync to sync files / directories between my desktop, laptop and even phone (Android). Also an external drive.

I ended up creating https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu which calls rsync under the hood but helps you build up a valid rsync command with no surprises. It also codifies each of your backup / restore strategies so you're not having to run massively long rsync commands each time. It's 1 shell script with no dependencies except rsync.

Nothing leaves my local network since it's all local file transfers.

Until I want to share with say… anyone that isn’t on HN :)

If you're not aware, the GP was a reference to the original Dropbox HN post, wherein BrandonM said, effectively, "why wouldn't I just use rsync?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I am pretty sure I knew that and forgot it and now I know it again :)

Then S3 is not going to be a lot better :)

Just make a route on your web server, making all the files available with some long, impossible to guess, unique ID that can be shared. Like https://files.<your domain>/<id here>.

If they want to collaborate, they can just post the changed file, using the auth key you generated for them set in some header field, to https://files.<your domain>/<id here>, which could automatically increment revision numbers. Then you could access specific revisions with .../<id here>/rev/<revision>.

So much easier than installing an app! You could literally just use curl as the interface! (I kid)

Hah, yeah. I do have a one line CLI script to upload a file to S3, get a shareable link, and send it to me on ntfy.sh. And my family all have ntfy.sh so that honestly is viable for some things. But still, not really all that workable for many things. And only I have this power in my family

Except that for macOS it uses the FileProvider Framework. So files that are rarely accessed get deleted from your local storage and synced back automagically when you access them. Saving space on your disk because on mac you can’t upgrade your ssd without a soldering iron.

> but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced

Which mobile OS would that be?

The big reason I stopped being excited about cloud storage is that on mobile, from what I can tell, none of the major providers care about "folder that syncs" experience. You only get an app that lets you view remote storage. The only proper "folder that syncs" I had working on my phone so far was provided via Syncthing, but maintaining that turned out to be more effort than my tiny attention span can afford these days.

I'm using iOS and macOS. On macOS I have the folder that syncs experience (I'm using Synology Drive, but Dropbox works the same way), on iOS I have the "browse remote files" experience but I can pin files I always want to keep available which is what I want.

Right. It's similar to Windows and Android experience. Thing is, for the latter, I don't want to "pin files I always want to keep available" - I want them to actually exist as files in the shared storage, so other apps can operate on them as if on regular files.

(Unfortunately, both mobile platforms themselves are actively fighting this approach, and instead encourage apps to keep data in private databases and never expose them as actual files.)

I get the pain point, but databases are a much better data model for multi-device, intermittently-connected sync. Filesystems just aren’t designed to be async and conflict-resolving.

> databases are a much better data model for multi-device

Fyi, a filesystem is a database too.

And acid SQL databases ain't much better at that domain from my perspective.

The problem on mobile is more that the other apps don’t get access to the general file system, and/or prefer to import the files anyway.

My only major complaint with gdrive on Mac (besides Apple and Google but I have to deal with them for work) is that you can’t set the storage folder to an external location like with windows. I don’t want to be constantly loading/unloading media on my internal storage, but I don’t have a choice without janky work arounds. It’s a very frustratingly “Apple” thing to do.

Wow, I’m surprised. Of all my self-hosting solutions, this needs least maintenance, for me. Recently had to move to a fork of SyncTrazor, because a new project picked up support, but that’s the first time I had to think about it in years. Wish NextCloud and Immich were that easy!

I've been using Immich for some months now, it was just "install and forget" experience. Updating it to a new version also was very easy.

On iOS, Dropbox integrates with the Files app. Since that was added a couple of years ago, I rarely have to open the Dropbox app itself. About the only time is when I want to restore an earlier version of a file.

You can also mark complete folders as “Make Available Offline”, which will keep their contents updated, though I don’t really use that personally.

The biggest benefit of the ios dropbox app is to search through the contents of all files. When accessing from the files app that is not possible, unfortunately.

Obsidian is exactly this, it just totally doesn't act like it. in fact, it is a bit fiddly to make it do this. but THIS is why Obsidian is so useful

Seafile seems to have that feature, but upload only.

And I haven't tried it ... unfortunately, the Android app is also ...... buggy.

There's a number of s3 front ends for web as well as native mobile s3 clients like S3Drive that provide exactly that https://s3drive.app/

Yes, notably, the File Provider extension is where the value is for me. Are there any open source options other than Seafile's SeaDrive?

NextCloud has a version with FP support

To me, integration with the Apple files app on iOS is critical for any Dropbox replacement (among other things).

Yep. Open source Dropbox is really Nextcloud - https://nextcloud.com

Given how many fuckups sync had over lifetime of it (at one point it basically asked for re-log every day, at other it just corrupted data/didn't finish sync), no

I use OpenCloud nowadays https://opencloud.eu and can really recommend it. It was easy to install on a VM and uses S3 for storage. No database needed.

Isn't that the scenario for Nextcloud?

Yeah but it seems like that can also be replicated with modest effort.

That's a very typical HN/developer response that often underestimates the effort and the interest people have into a self-rolled solution outside of tech / self-hosting circles. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47674176)

Groan*

No one said self rolled. I'm just saying the moat seems quite shallow.

Yes Syncthing does those things

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