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How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux

arstechnica.com — Ars tests Dropbox, a shiny new cross-platform file synchronization tool that delivers seamless platform integration and a very nice feature set.

Who dugg this? Made popular Sep 15, 2008

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  • LastDitchHero, on 09/15/2008, -0/+48We don't do that here
  • mkpaa, on 09/15/2008, -3/+39"I have a dream". A movable "Dropbox" you can host on provider of your choice even on your home server.

    When Dropbox some day safe&private it will eventually be usable. Technically it is just amazing already.
  • samanathon, on 09/15/2008, -5/+37I would kill to be able to run this on my own server. I have way more then 2GB's that I need backed up and sync across Windows and Linux. Any thoughts?
  • openprivacy, on 09/15/2008, -2/+23Privacy please! I use unison and/or backuppc to sync/backup files from various computers to my file server. I don't have anything to hide - other than the usual personal correspondences and business documents - but I don't really trust that external servers won't at least datamine the data so they can make an extra buck (well, *lots* of extra bucks!) from selling profile information, even on the off-chance they aggregate/anonymize the data (which they don't promise).

    from http://www.getdropbox.com/terms:
    BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR, YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER AND/OR ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE ‘MY DROPBOX,’ ‘DROPBOX’ FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX.

    Note also their privacy policy explicitly does not refer to any data you store on their service.
  • glabbage, on 09/15/2008, -1/+19blocked
  • Angostura, on 09/15/2008, -0/+12Yup, it only sends deltas - at the intra-file level, only the parts of the file that are changed are sent.
  • idiotonuni, on 09/15/2008, -2/+13had it since private beta....loved it since private beta
  • oyako, on 09/15/2008, -0/+10have you tried http://www.getdropbox.com/browse2 yet? ;)
  • naspeeddemon, on 09/15/2008, -0/+9 there is a web interface that you can use to retrieve the backed up files.
  • naspeeddemon, on 09/15/2008, -5/+13been a drop box user for almost 6 months. and had the harddrive fail on my xp machine in that time frame, thankfully most of the important files were backed up on dropbox and i was able to get those back.
  • mark076h, on 09/15/2008, -3/+10I like the idea of being able to host your own dropbox service, would be cool if you cold host your own and have that connected to the dropbox storage for double redundancy.
  • moschops, on 09/15/2008, -0/+7Great that it is cross-platform but too bad they use S3 for storage and don't support self-hosting. I have tens of gigs of media files to sync across platforms - this would be too expensive. Ideally I just want to sync *between* my nodes, not to a central server - or just a restricted set to the central server as well for access via the web from a non-node computer (like with Microsoft's Live Mess which lets you do this).
  • Izacus, on 09/15/2008, -1/+8Can it do delta copies (meaning, it copies only the parts of files that actually changed... recopying few GB of mail files everytime they change over slow wireless is a pain)?

    Only program that I've found that can do that is rsync, but windows implementation of it is sorely lacking.
  • bieber, on 09/15/2008, -2/+8Gotta say, their promotion seems a little shady. The very top of the "Download Dropbox" page says "It's here, it's open source, and it's free software!" Scroll down a little, and then it tells you "Well, except for the part that actually makes the whole thing work..."
  • TehDoctor, on 09/15/2008, -1/+7picturesnstuff: that is pointless in comparison to just using rsync && nfs. I don't know why you think that wouldn't work for more than one machine.

    The only improvement I could think of is instead of using cron jobs, make some kind of event-trigger for the rsync process based on mtime in the file timestamps.
  • thadd, on 09/15/2008, -1/+7I use Unison to do the same thing on my own server. It's great because it's easy to use, cross-platform, and the OS X GUI client is pretty nice. You can also add some nice browser-based indexes for easy web access. It makes keeping all of my various computers in sync dirt simple.

    See more info: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
  • cawpin, on 09/15/2008, -0/+6That would rock. I have a VPN with a friend across the country. We would love to have each others data backed up. We would have to ship hard drives for the initial backup, but after that we could use this.
  • homercles337, on 09/15/2008, -1/+6Yea, i have been using it since early Beta. I think its just truly fantastic. Ubiquitous computing here we come!
  • javaroast, on 09/15/2008, -1/+6Take a look at Unison. It is cross platform and should be able to meet your needs.

    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
  • cawpin, on 09/15/2008, -2/+7If it works in OS X, I would assume it would work in Linux.
  • stoni, on 09/15/2008, -2/+7What about KDE?
  • noolvidaremos, on 09/15/2008, -2/+6rsync + nfs + cronjobs
  • MrsBabyWomen, on 09/15/2008, -10/+14I digg the article, but it's more of a sales pitch. rsync, scp, and ssh are unreliable? "...access to important data when the tubes are clogged" Come 'on... When are the "tubes" clogged to your home broadband connection?
  • squishybananas, on 09/15/2008, -1/+5I think that peer to peer syncing (i.e. not going through the dropbox servers) used to be on the list of features being worked on. However, it seems to have been removed. I don't know what's going on with it at present, but it's certainly a possibility.
  • Hosalabad, on 09/15/2008, -0/+4That's the biggest hangup I've heard so far. Great product.
  • captmorgan555, on 09/15/2008, -0/+4As others have said above. It works great but i would prefer to host it myself. I don't like not knowing where my data is. So for the time being i am only using it for non personal data.
  • WoollyMittens, on 09/15/2008, -3/+6This is not a sync app, it's a proprietary (costly) cloud-storage subscription.

    On a more constructive note: Couldn't you achieve the same thing by installing a (free) Subversion server and hook it up to your router? I'm not trying to be an ass, I'm just wondering if such a thing could work.




  • alexbu, on 09/15/2008, -16/+19Don't digg MrBabyMan.
  • Piku, on 09/15/2008, -1/+4On OS X you can 'ln -s' the folder inside dropbox and it syncs it. Don't know if it works on linux.
  • d3matt, on 09/15/2008, -2/+5yes

    http://www.getdropbox.com/tour#3
  • PabloIV, on 09/15/2008, -1/+4I was thinking this would be great for my company but I'm not sure how comfortable my paranoid ass is with hosting sensitive files on a Web-service's server. If you give me a version of this where I can install the web UI on my own box I'd be willing to pay a considerable amount of money for the full solution.
  • inactive, on 09/16/2008, -0/+2"Two of my friends work for dropbox, you insensitive clod!"

    Doesn't make them any less spammers. ***** off and die.
  • Culyt, on 09/15/2008, -2/+4Please don't support spammers on Digg, the last dropbox article had 3000+ Diggs on the frontpage when now many get over 500 and some get 2000, and pages of comments along the lines of, "I use Dropbox, its awesome", "Love this application!", "Absolutely priceless!", "Best freaking app ever!", "I use it with all my friends and family", "I can't wait until I can pay money for more space.", "I love App", they also correctly capitalized the D in just about all the comments, you can see these comments here:
    http://digg.com/software/Dropbox_GDrive_Killer_fin ...

    It also seems that the CEO was the person who submitted the article, and there where many people who signed up on the day to comment.

    Digg seems to have blocked the first article from appearing in search results:
    http://digg.com/search?s=dropbox&submit=Search&sec ...

    There was also someone from SugarSync spamming, they had a little spam war. At least in their case it was only 1 person, although they where a bit more marketing cut and paste.

    They also seem to reply to the comments about the spam with mundane things like "You should try it first, its an awesome app." completely ignoring the spamming issue or making it sound like spam is somehow legitimized because of the hardwork of the developers.

    I don't care how good your product is you don't get that many Diggs with that many extremely generic yet positive comments.

    ☢
  • jcronkhite, on 09/15/2008, -1/+3Dropbox has been my online USB key for a while now. When the Linux beta client was release recently, it worked the same as on Windows and Mac (I have all for different reasons) so I was excited that I finally found a solution. I'd be happy to pay for real storage using this service. But I would need the option to select which folders sync to avoid long downloads of data not needed everywhere. Either way, I love this service.
  • xptweakerntn, on 09/15/2008, -1/+3You could pay the money for the "bigger" version.
    If the two computers are in the same house, like my two *nix boxes are, simply look into bash scripting. Also, take rsync into consideration. It has various syncing tags, just make sure you can read/write both the computers. If they aren't on the same network in the same house, you'll almost have to have something like Dropbox.
  • runep, on 09/15/2008, -2/+4Proprietary crap: "According to the Dropbox developers, there are no plans to open the synchronization protocol"
  • NJank, on 09/15/2008, -0/+2i believe he would kill for the free, no-cap version. i vote for the killing. only interesting things could come out of it.
  • bastion_xx, on 09/15/2008, -0/+2Yup, clients for Windows, OS X and Linux.
  • smylie, on 09/15/2008, -0/+2Good concept . . . . Great that they now have a linux client . . . . But SUCKS to have nautilus as a dependency. (ie, there's no command line interface)

    I've no issues running Gnome on my desktop (I do at home and at work), but I *also* have a home server/media pc (Mythbuntu) that doesn't run Gnome, but would very handy to be able to easily sync files to.

    Sure, I could start up a second x session on this box via vnc, just to run gnome + nautilus, but that's a huge amount of mostly unneeded overhead.

    As the nautilus plugin is just a thin wrapper, with most of the smarts being in the dropboxd daemon, theres no reason they couldn't have this monitor a plain old directory (inotify anyone?) and synch that instead. That way it would still work exactly the same in gnome, and if you didn't want to fire up X, you'd still have exactly the same functionality from the command line.
  • slugicide, on 09/15/2008, -1/+3This seems like a killer app for the Linux netbook.
  • cmatt85, on 09/19/2008, -0/+1Dropbox encrypts all data for transfer, and uses SSL on port 443
  • AbstortedMinds, on 09/15/2008, -1/+2I've been using it since it came out, and its the best damn program I have. Saves me so much time. I have it synced over 3 computers and multiple shares with friends. Mac, Linux, Windows they all work perfectly. Major props
  • 1longtime, on 09/15/2008, -1/+2She represents all BabyWomen everywhere.
  • inactive, on 09/18/2008, -0/+1 @bwarne: I understand your point, but once they spammed digg, I don't think they deserve any slack. They have proven themselves to be unscrupulous and willing to game the system for their own commercial gain. It's not some "little etiquette rule", as you say, it's undermining the basic system of Digg. If a bunch of people sign up only to copy-paste comments on an article (submitted by their CEO, for commercial reasons), that's not a "flash-mob", it's just spam, or at best astro-turfing. Either way, I will bury every single mention of DB from now on.
  • Joh739, on 09/15/2008, -0/+1I use this program very happily with my macbook from school and my Ubuntu desktop, sooo handy. It receives a solid 8,7 from me, and they're still in beta :D.
  • c0nv1ct, on 09/15/2008, -1/+2I just started using this and I love it, great crossplatform support for all my boxes.

    Though i agree with the previous posters, universal support for webdav or svn/git would be a dream come true. It sucks being stuck with just 2gb and having to pay for more when I have over 200gb of unused space on my web host and much more than that on a local server.
  • Hollow5, on 09/15/2008, -1/+2:|
  • tvma, on 09/18/2008, -1/+2BEWARE.. you are "syncing" your files over http without any encryption. Watch, start syncronizing and open tcpdump, you can see all your information floating across and going right over the internets...

    Redigg when I see some SSL being used, until then, I don't think soo..
  • inactive, on 09/15/2008, -0/+1You must be new here.
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