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Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

>A bigger long-term worry is the plummeting price of digital storage.

They mention that Google offers their service cheaper. But not the fact that you can have your own personal terabyte cloud for a couple hundred bucks, one you personally own and control, and never have to pay a subscription for. That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

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Wait, are you really comparing a personal NAS lying somewhere in your office (or even DC) with a proper cloud storage system? what about redundance, reliability, downtime, just to name a few? a personal NAS is obviously a very good solution for a limited subset of use cases compared to something like dropbox or Google drive, but not a definitive alternative solution, in my opinion.

> [...] why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Not only that, but a business with questionable security credentials, that has already had one absolutely spectacular security cock-up (referring to the June 2011 incident in which any account could be accessed without a password for four hours)

Never used it, never will.

I've wondered why nobody has done a good Dropbox clone where you run the server yourself. I'm guessing there is no business model.

Aerofs is something like that https://www.aerofs.com/

It is a really nice product, somehow I keep falling back on Dropbox in actual use though.

I wonder when they're launching. They've been invite only for a really long time now.

I've been using it for a year (I know some people there); it is by far my favorite of the cloud storage products.

Pretty much my needs are something like AeroFS, PLUS some kind of local SAN/NAS (big, fast), PLUS something like Sharepoint, Kerio Workspace, or Atlassian Confluence. None of them really cover all my needs alone.

This is an interesting take on that: http://spacemonkey.com/

I use git-annex for pretty much that. It's rapidly gaining features that make it a Dropbox replacement.

http://owncloud.org/

www.powerfolder.com

1tb is already $100/month on EC2. (Of course, you'd need a running instance to do anything with it.) The real gain with Dropbox is with their incredibly seamless client. DMCA and FISA do not matter to most users.

Bare storage is $95/TB/month on S3, too (plus i/o charges), no running instance required.

The rest of your comment is well-taken; there are otherdesktop clients for S3 but nothing that I've seen is anywhere near as convenient as Dropbox (which is itself using S3 for the actual storage, of course). User experience matters.

I think before that can happen we need really good open source software for it, and make it easy for anyone, and I mean anyone, to set one up, and set up all their data to be synced with it.

>That is what threatens Dropbox and friends the most. Once storage becomes cheap enough to price personal NAS clouds below $100 (and upstream bandwidth gets faster than molasses), why would anybody trust a DMCA/FISA-encumbered, subscription-based business with their data?

Because it's not the price, it's the convenience.

Plus that very very few people understand what "DMCA/FISA-encumbered" and even fewer care about it (for example, I understand what it means, but still don't care).

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