Strongsync – Host your own Dropbox using only SFTP or S3 | Hacker News Reader

Strongsync – Host your own Dropbox using only SFTP or S3

expandrive.com

44 pointshemancuso52 comments

I'm a big fan of git-annex. http://git-annex.branchable.com/

A bit fiddlier but very powerful. Supports S3, Glacier, tahoe-lafs, box.com, google drive, google cloud storage, mega.co.nz, skydrive, owncloud, Flickr, IMAP and Usenet!

Claims not to be a Dropbox clone - but overlaps the problem space somewhat :)

The main thing I need for all of these is android support to upload my photos. That is literally the only thing tying me to dropbox today. I already use TC containers with stupidly long passwords for the "sensitive" stuff (i.e., my porn and ex gf pics) so I'm not overly concerned with that but dropbox strikes me as not-very-secure in general.

We (rsync.net) are big fans of git-annex[1] as well, but we are more than happy to support all of the above.

That's what's nice about this new software from expandrive - it works over plain old SFTP.

I'd like to see about a mixed use dropbox clone - where some (expert) users access it with either git-annex or the git+encfs method[1] and other users access it with this new tool from expandrive.

Remember to ask about our "HN Readers" discount ...

[1] https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_e...

EDIT: actually simultaneously hosting strongsync and git+encfs users would be difficult since strongsync couldn't handle the encfs aspect of it, but I think we'll still test out a simultaneous git-annex / strongsync model ...

I've been using owncloud a bit lately, on my phone too. Not entirely satisfied with it I must admit, but seems to show some promise.

p.s: I'm amused how last time you replied to one of my comments you were being critical of how I was promoting my business on HN, heh. Your satirical powers are strong my friend! ;)

Does this software just emulate ftp when reading/writing to s3 since s3 doesn't actually support any type of ftp protocol?

After purchasing Expandrive and then discovering that it isn't compatible with Amazon AWS's IAM credentialing due to a bug, I'm reticent to try yet another product from these guys. Their response when I reported the bug and asked when it would be fixed: "Not yet, sorry! About to release a new product, things are very hectic. We'll have it fixed soon though." That was October and I suppose this is the new product that was holding up the bug fix.

That was fixed a month or two ago, run the auto updater! :) If it fails for you, there must be some other issue, ping us again if that is the case.

I've been using ExpanDrive since version 2, and I've been reasonably pleased with customer service and the pace of bug fixes/improvements (and ExpanDrive 3 is a huge improvement over 2, at least on Windows). It's a very small shop, so I can see how trying to ship two products at once would cause them problems in how much they can support either.

I really wish the documentation on the site gave a better idea of why I'd want to use this instead of/along with ExpanDrive, though.

How well was this beta tested?

I noticed the introductory price is only good until the end of the year which is less than two weeks away. Not a lot of time to play with it before the price increases.

I feel it would be better to have a public beta (instead of a trial) to work out all of the kinks first. I remember the problems with the early versions of Dropbox when it was first released.

It soft launched 2 months ago and has been banged against publicly for a while.

I am a paid customer of ExpanDrive and never received any notification about this software being soft launched or tested. Probably would of been a good idea to soft launch to all paid ExpanDrive users to help with testing.

After installing the software, I got a 404 link when the installer tried to open a page.

http://www.expandrive.com/stronsync/welcome

404 Not Found What you are looking for is not here

Both of those issues have been rectified!

FYI Still seeing the 404 now.

Very beta-like (or even pre-beta), bad looking version. In my 15minutes test by just removing file from the local folder during sync I caused a full stop for any sync operations. Restart didn't help, the only way to "fix" it was to remove data store on SFTP side and re-connect clients. Sync speed is low (seems to be limited to something around 3MB/s, on LAN). All operations seem to be sequential. Integration with Finder just a joke, most time it doesn't refresh green/orange badge automatically. From time to time client shows odd messages like "over limit, upgrade plan" (what limit?, what plan?). In my opinion - doesn't worth any money yet. I'll stay with btsync for sync and seafile for dropbox-like.

I'm pro- paying for software, but...

Has anyone used this and maybe found it's easier to set up than SparkleShare[0]? Maybe their deduplication technology beats git?

[0]http://sparkleshare.org

I'd say Strongsync is easier to set up because there's no server to set up (if you use S3). SparkleShare requires a remote git repository on a server somewhere.

Github, Bitbucket, Gitorius, Planio... or your own server (very simple setup). Setting up Sparkleshare is simple.

I prefer Sparkleshare. But as it is backed by git, big files are not what Sparkleshare is for.

You can use Github, and other available git services with Sparkleshare, or setup your own server, fairly easy.

I tried Strongsync. I pass.

My suggestion to developers of such tools: whenever you make S3 an option, try to also include Glacier. I think it's good for the market to start understanding the difference between those two types of backup and their respective values. We should start breaking the old paradigm of "having as many copies as we can of the same thing saved in different places".

So what would be the advantage over Dropbox? Storage price? It is not a big issue for me personally.

Basically what I want is the Dropbox clone with client side encryption, with open-source client that is able to work either with proprietary servers or (better yet), open-source server and/or with S3 and other backends.

Edit: I'll check out SparkleShare!

Client side encryption is coming [in beta] soon.

with a python api please? so that i can read and write data encrypted using python with my own keys.

You can do client-side encryption with Dropbox or Google Drive, nothing is stopping you from doing it.

I have an encrypted EncFS volume that I keep in Google Drive and it has been working really well, being synced between 3 computers. I'm on Ubuntu and in Ubuntu it's easy to create an Encfs volume with the Gnome Encfs Manager. Just make sure you pick a strong encryption password.

What I like about this approach is that I don't want all files to be encrypted, only my documents, certificates, licenses and so on. But I don't want to encrypt the PDFs in my technical books collection, because I want those PDFs to be accessible from anywhere. I also have an iPad for example, I use the GDrive client to download the PDFs and open it in Adobe's Reader.

Therefore I have two problems with alternatives to well established cloud storage, like Dropbox and GDrive:

- hosting your files on S3 or on some instance somewhere costs more - I need clients for Linux (workstation), OS X (workstation), Windows (my wife), Android (my phone) and iPad (my ebook reader)

It would be nice to let us know what's on the roadmap. I like the product, but I feel a bit blind on what you're going to add next.

Does Sparkleshare do client-side encryption? I didn't think so, since it's based on git.

It does, it's right in the home page. Judging from the source, it encrypts files individually on top of Git.

Indeed, it's right at the top! Oops. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'll plug SpiderOak here. Pretty decent prices and service, but their client was pretty awful the last time I used it... and encryption vastly slows the file sync (at least, it seemed so).

Hope that helps you though!

Thank you for chiming in. I am a paid user of SpiderOak. And it is great... when it works. I was able to get through rather complicated interface and I am OK most of the time with slower sync performance, but sometimes it just breaks out of the blue. Also, the client is not open-source. Granted they have open-source projects on the same infrastructure (nimbus.io) but this is something else.

They don't mention client side encryption, only encrypted connection (naturally for SSL, and HTTPS for S3 I guess). If they don't support it, it would be a deal breaker for me.

I use ownCloud for this, though it doesn't hit every feature you want, but it does have a lot of other stuff I needed (CalDAV and CardDAV server, and a stack of other neat apps that are finally getting native app counterparts on mobile!). I now host all my own data, yay!

Thanks for suggesting this. I will check it out.

I just recently started using Bittorrent Sync just for the ability that I can "host" all of my own files, and not rely on S3, DropBox, etc.

My thing is is that I'm pretty damn good with PHP, so it's also fun for me to hack on, as well as being pretty damned powerful (and solid, as of v5) :)

Any advantages over the mature and feature rich FOSS Pydio project? I have two installs of this at work and people seem to like it. I disabled more than a few plugins to keep it simpler for end users, but its a great little piece of software.

I hope this works well... I'd gladly pay for a Dropbox-like sync that syncs to my own servers. I know there's a git-based alternative out there but it has some issues and is much slower than Dropbox.

Downloaded it, installed it. Added a file to test. Saw the objects being created on S3. Deleted the file, sync done. All objects are left behind.

How (and/or) when do they get deleted?

I'm an ownCloud [1] user. It's free, open source, and pretty easy to set up.

[1] http://owncloud.org/

why not use unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Probably because it is not actively developed anymore and does not support S3 and all these wonderful backends promised on their page (like Rackspace CloudFiles)

Strongsync also has full dedup and integration with filesystem monitoring on multiple platforms.

Meh. Plugging for ownCloud. (owncloud.org)

For sparkle, how does the client work? Is it installed on the machine and then uses git to pull differences?

No mobile client makes it a non starter for me. Mobile access is one of my main use cases for Dropbox.

But the point is it's over SSH/SFTP/S3 where you presumably have other (plain) ways of accessing it.

Good point, didn't think of that.

More details needed. How does dedup work? How is data encrypted at rest, etc.

Available For Mac and Windows Linux available early 2013 :>

Oops.

How is Strongsync different from Expandrive?

Should have called it Strongbox.

The windows download link 404s.

fixed, was updating

Reply on news.ycombinator.com