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Comment by scurvy | Hacker News Reader

I'm really surprised that no one has mentioned Bittorrent Sync as a Dropbox competitor. We all have several TB's of extra storage lying around between our work computer, laptop, home machine, phones, etc. Why not sync stuff directly between all of your machines and skip the cloud middleman (and the chance that all your files are belong to someone else)? Remember that day or two when anyone could log in to someone else's Dropbox account?

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Or Syncthing, which does very much the same thing as BTSync -- multi-way sync of one or more directories between several computers you own/control. Syncthing is free software, and offers better security guarantees than BTSync, but as a result it's slightly harder to set up a folder on each client.

Or there's also OwnCloud, which gives you a very simple user experience; you just need to have a centralized storage server set up.

I just made that switch, being frustrated by Dropbox and Google drive for reasons of no interest to anyone but me.

What I fear losing is previous versions. That saved my bacon once. Well, bacon bits at least.

Also, my repositories are far larger than devices like my phone can use. With Drive I can just pull up the one PDF that I want to read on my phone. Not sure how this works, or if it works, with Bittorrent Sync.

> Bittorrent Sync

Because it is still closed source AND requires all your computers to be online for syncing to work.

I went with SpiderOak. Happy user.

Not all must be online, just 2. Also, Dropbox isn't open source, nor Box, Google, Microsoft. I don't think that's really a requirement for success in this space.

Only one computer needs to be online for the sync to work. This is a good thing because your files never go to a third party. You don't have to trust Dropbox or anyone else with your data. Plop it on a couple of servers and you're good to go.

Dropbox supports LAN sync, which is like BT Sync. I'm surprised this isn't a killer feature for companies. If I upload 100MB to a shared folder, other sync tools will download a copy for every user. That could be a huge amount of traffic. BTSync and Dropbox solve that problem.

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