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Comment by jingo | Hacker News Reader

I've got something I like better than Dropbox. It's called rdiff.

It does one thing only: deduplication.

All the other stuff needed for remote, incremental backups, e.g., moving files back and forth over a network, can be done with other open source tools. I think I have a pretty good command of moving files around with open source software... I do not need a third party to help me via an obfuscated blob of Python and who knows what else.

I like having control over my backups versus trusting it all to some closed-source, third party, "all-in-one" application.

In my mind having control and transparency will always be more powerful than handing over my data deduplication and backup to a third party, such as "Dropbox".

But I imagine there are few others who would agree. Forgive me for not loving Dropbox. Maybe some day I will see the light.

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Don't think of Dropbox as backup. Think of Dropbox as a convenient way of syncing files across multiple platforms, both traditional and mobile.

I'm a big fan of open source when it works but there is nothing as seamless as Dropbox when it comes to syncing.

What do you mean by better? My grandparents manage to use Dropbox. I think that's pretty amazing.

How do I set up these tools to automatically sync a set of files between multiple computers and make them accessible from my smartphone and tablet?

It's been mentioned in a few other comments, but ownCloud does all that.

https://owncloud.org/

You don't even need to set it up yourself:

https://owncloud.org/providers/

Thanks for the pointer. I'd heard about that before but never really checked it out. Looks pretty straightforward.

If you don't mind hosting yourself, Seafile is also open source and has really nice Mac/Windows/Linux/Android/iOS client apps. It also does delta syncs, which I don't believe ownCloud supports yet:

http://seafile.com/en/download/ http://manual.seafile.com/

Thanks, that sounds even better.

What's with the lack of delta syncs in all these systems? As far as I know, neither Google Drive nor OneDrive do it. Now you're saying ownCloud doesn't do it either. I didn't even think to look at it for oneCloud because obviously they'd support it.

I consider it to be an essential feature, to the point that I won't bother with something that doesn't support it. I guess I'm unusual in that respect.

I suspected I would get downvoted for not loving Dropbox. And I was right. Interesting.

FYI

rdiff is the reference implementation or first example of a utility written with librsync, which is the library that Dropbox used to build their "business".

Usage: rdiff [OPTIONS] signature [BASIS [SIGNATURE]] [OPTIONS] delta SIGNATURE [NEWFILE [DELTA]] [OPTIONS] patch BASIS [DELTA [NEWFILE]]

Options: -v, --verbose Trace internal processing -V, --version Show program version -?, --help Show this help message -s, --statistics Show performance statistics Delta-encoding options: -b, --block-size=BYTES Signature block size -S, --sum-size=BYTES Set signature strength --paranoia Verify all rolling checksums IO options: -I, --input-size=BYTES Input buffer size -O, --output-size=BYTES Output buffer size -z, --gzip[=LEVEL] gzip-compress deltas -i, --bzip2[=LEVEL] bzip2-compress deltas

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