Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
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Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
1–10 of 60 posts
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#2I've looked at this project before, it looks like a nice implementation of rsync with inotify, but it seems to be just for a typical use case for rsync, ie, push your local changes to a remote host.
I think if you try to use this like a real dropbox, ie changes occurring on multiple hosts at or around the same time you are going to run in to issues. Also does lysnc handle deleting data on the remote end and propagting those changes out (rsync --del). Also I'm wondering how it will handle conflicts and open files (which it says isn't recommended). I see the .dropbox dir using some type of uuid's or sha1 sigs so I'm sure its doing something more sophisticated to keep things in sync. I've noticed my daemon has died on my linux box every once in a while, and it somehow tracks multiple changes from multiple hosts and replays those transactions correctly and everything rolls up fine.
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#3I don't plan on ditching Dropbox, but I'm definitely interested in having a similar sort of automatic backup with diffs that I can host myself. This looks like it might be an option.
Does anyone else handle this in a different way?
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#4lsyncd does the brunt of the work. it uses inotify, which is a facility of the linux kernel, to tell which files should be copied. but i think there is a problem.
inotify is not guaranteed to see every file system access. in fact, it often misses them when the file system is busy because there is an upper bound upon the number of inotify events that can be queued, set in /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events.
i.e., you could get data loss using this mechanism alone. you need to also run rsync every so often, i think.
the lsyncd guys are aware of this: http://code.google.com/p/lsyncd/
(maybe this is how dropbox works under linux too, if so it presumably has the same problem..)
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#5I don't understand why dropbox doesn't open source their client. Their business isn't built off of their technology, which, while nice, isn't exactly novel. They make their money from selling storage. Open sourcing their client doesn't change the fundamental fact people need the space to store stuff.
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#6I don't understand why dropbox doesn't open source their client. Their business isn't built off of their technology, which, while nice, isn't exactly novel. They make their money from selling storage. Open sourcing their client doesn't change the fundamental fact people need the space to store stuff.
Showing it doesn't necessarily hurt Dropbox isn't enough. You have to show that it actually helps Dropbox to open-source the client. Otherwise, why should they?
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#7I don't understand why dropbox doesn't open source their client. Their business isn't built off of their technology, which, while nice, isn't exactly novel. They make their money from selling storage. Open sourcing their client doesn't change the fundamental fact people need the space to store stuff.
Their business isn't built off of their technology, which, while nice, isn't exactly novel.
well, be careful with such claims. many technologies don't seem novel at first glance, but i'm sure there are lots of novel tricks they play under-the-hood to get their system to run quickly and reliably.
e.g., google's pagerank is now well-known and public, but i'm sure that they have lots of 'secret sauce' internal algorithms to make their search index work even better, and they definitely don't want to share those secrets
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#8I don't understand why dropbox doesn't open source their client. Their business isn't built off of their technology, which, while nice, isn't exactly novel. They make their money from selling storage. Open sourcing their client doesn't change the fundamental fact people need the space to store stuff.
Showing it doesn't necessarily hurt Dropbox isn't enough. You have to show that it actually helps Dropbox to open-source the client. Otherwise, why should they?
2 things that I can think of immediately
1. Would increase adoption on Linux clients 2. Increased security (the whole security though obscurity doesn't work thing)
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Showing it doesn't necessarily hurt Dropbox isn't enough. You have to show that it actually helps Dropbox to open-source the client. Otherwise, why should they?
2 things that I can think of immediately 1. Would increase adoption on Linux clients 2. Increased security (the whole security though obscurity doesn't work thing)
Well, I don't think the Linux market is big enough to make it a compelling argument (but I really don't know; I could be dead wrong).
As for security, I'm not sure how big a problem Dropbox has with security. And I would't open-source a client just to get better security for it, but maybe that's just me.
Open sourcing the client is betting on the fact that the client doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe it does. More importantly, maybe we think it doesn't matter right now, but we'll find out that we were wrong in 2 years, after it's too late.
Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone
#10except that it misses 90% of what dropbox does. like multi client sync, cross platform, shared folders, web interface and so on