Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

fak3r.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#21

Post by rw- »

dododo wrote: post #4

lsyncd 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.,…

inotify is also unable to inherit handlers. after a "mkdir -p a/b/c/d" it is very likely that "d" is untracked. therefore lsyncd is useless on real systems. :(

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#22

Post by mikeyg »

Zimbra's open source edition's WebDAV sharing works well once you get the URLs figured out. You get a lot more fine grained permissions. It's cross platform, there are shared folders, etc.. if that's what you're looking for. You can make folders public to share with others, and so on. With bandwidth as fat as it is these days DAV's heavyness doesn't feel so heavy anymore. Am I the only one that shares these sentiments? Did I mention it works on MacOS 10.6, Linux, and Windows 7?

If you're using Dropbox to back up some of these other solutions might make more sense. Crafting up a script using hard links and rsync can give you daily snapshots of any filesystem at only the storage cost of the delta (which can be easily turned into a cron job) .. here's a decent resource for that:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#23

Post by bgaluszka »

edanm wrote: post #14
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux as a desktop client is potentially too small a market to address, I'm not sure the same could be said about the Linux server market.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that. Are people using Dropbox on servers, though? A lot of the benefits of Dropbox don't strike me as helping for servers, for the most part. I don't have too much experience, but it seems to me servers are one place you have to actively manage your backups, and can't rely on the "it just works" philosophy of Dropbox.

I share folders on server with other Dropbox users (developers, designers). For me it's better alternative than webdav, ftp or scp. They work localy and everything syncs between them and to server plus it has some version control.

I would even use it commercially in my products but API lacks ability to share folders. For now you have to do it manually.

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#24

Post by mrduncan »

xxpor wrote: post #5

I 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.

From Drew's original YC application [0]:

# Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?

This idea requires executing well in several somewhat orthogonal directions, and missteps in any torpedo the entire product.

For example, there's an academic/theoretical component: designing the protocol and app to behave consistently/recoverably when any power or ethernet cord in the chain could pop out at any time. There's a gross Win32 integration piece (ditto for a Mac port). There's a mostly Linux/Unix-oriented operations/sysadmin and scalability piece. Then there's the web design and UX piece to make things simple and sexy. Most of these hats are pretty different, and if executing in all these directions was easy, a good product/service would already exist.

I'd find it hard to believe that there isn't some very tricky stuff being done in the clients which gives them a big competitive advantage over competitors that pop up.

[0] http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#25

Post by res0nat0r »

gvb wrote: post #17

What about using unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ instead of lsyncd? It seems like it would be more resilient. It does look like unison would require a cron job or human trigger where lsyncd is triggered by a file/directory change. On the plus side, it seems like unison would work better in an offline mode.

I've tried to use this on syncing my mp3 directory between two boxes and it seemed to be horribly slow. It needs to stat each file for a second or two before it even begins to sync, this takes way too long.

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#26

Post by aidanf »

tommynazareth wrote: post #3

I 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?

I've used Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) to get a dropbox type setup running across several machines.

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#28

Post by telemachos »

This is an off-topic short rant. Vote as you like (obvious enough), but skip reading this if you want on-topic discussion.

Shoot me if this is how the web is heading. (Recent browsing suggests maybe it is...) We get not only the insufferable "bottom bar" (is there a standard name for those yet?), but also a "top bar", a hover "Click Here to Share" box and a pop-up "Learn More, Instantly" box (not to mention the general clutter and overdense design).

Man, that's foul.

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#29

Post by rmc »

xxpor wrote: post #5

I 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.

If it's open source, anyone can run a "DropBox sever", and charge what they want. This would mean DropBox does all the hardwork and is then undercut by someone else charging less than them.

Re: Build An Opensource Dropbox Clone

#30

Post by brlewis »

edanm wrote: post #14
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux as a desktop client is potentially too small a market to address, I'm not sure the same could be said about the Linux server market.

Good point, I hadn't thought of that. Are people using Dropbox on servers, though? A lot of the benefits of Dropbox don't strike me as helping for servers, for the most part. I don't have too much experience, but it seems to me servers are one place you have to actively manage your backups, and can't rely on the "it just works" philosophy of Dropbox.

Not many are using Dropbox on servers yet, but if their users upload files, they should.

My itty bitty part-time startup has a better uploader than Flickr, thanks to Dropbox on the server. Users share a folder with the server and copy photos into it that they want uploaded. They can be choosing photos to upload even with no connection, e.g. traveling with a laptop.

Post reply on HN