I've been wanting to cancel Dropbox as well. But I choose a different path which includes Bitcasa. I wrote a blogpost about it earlier: http://blog.noort.be/2013/08/02/backup-in-2013.html
Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
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Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#12btsync is really nice, just install the software, no account creation needed, and if you just want to sync computers on a LAN, no internet connection needed. I was worried about btsync being closed source but when I looked at alternatives like dropbox and spideroak I noticed they weren't open either and you have to sign up for an account and give them personal information to get serious amounts of storage.
Everyone who's looking to run their own private Dropbox should check out ownCloud[1]. It's free, open source, you install it on your own server (or Raspberry Pi), and it's not P2P like BTsync is. It works more like Dropbox, with a centralized server. You just run that server yourself.
They have apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. I've been using it for about two months now with no problems.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#13It doesn't need to be a USB 3.0 drive. The RPi is USB 2.0 only.
I've stopped reading when he really recommended that you get a USB 3.0 drive to connect to a RPi :P
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#14How well does BTSync work in terms of a large team collaborating together? Dropbox has a habit of just working, with surprisingly few hiccups (none so far except during massive folder migrations). Does BTSync work that well with a team of 10? 20? 30? that work on the same set of documents (though not on the same document simultaneously, so no need for e.g. git).
Given that it's using the Bittorrent protocol (Basically) to handle the actual transfers, yes it will work; the issue you may run into is that there can be a lot of files and data available in the share and every client will try to download all files.
That happens with Dropbox too though.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#15I installed and played with BTSync yesterday. It was really easy to get it all up and running syncing between two local machines and a remote server. The config was really simple compared to other stuff I've used. Sometimes it could take a while before the syncing would start which is a bit of a pain.
We run a system where we have a lot of data on a server that we want to see locally. Edits are made both locally and on the server. At the moment we're using Aerofs to handle the syncing. As a general rule it works really well. The issue we've run into is with pre-seeding new machines (ie, when our spot instance based server get killed). I need to play around a bit more but it's time consuming to get a machine back online and totally synced (there may be a solution to this).
Mostly it's a pain being at the mercy of someone else's magic. Aero is great, except when it isn't - and we don't know the rules. That's a real pain if it's business critical. BTSync looked great - until I realised that it's not opensource either.
There are a few syncing options on there but they don't all tick all the boxes. Unison doesn't trigger on fs events so you have to run it manually. BTSync isn't opensource. Dropbox syncs to their servers and back. With AeroFS you don't always know how it's doing what it's doing.
So far AeroFS has been the winner for us. BTSync definitely looks like it fills the same space though.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that it's using the Bittorrent protocol (Basically) to handle the actual transfers, yes it will work; the issue you may run into is that there can be a lot of files and data available in the share and every client will try to download all files.
That happens with Dropbox too though.
Actually not. Dropbox has a feature called Selective Sync which lets you choose which files are synced to which computers.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#17btsync is really nice, just install the software, no account creation needed, and if you just want to sync computers on a LAN, no internet connection needed. I was worried about btsync being closed source but when I looked at alternatives like dropbox and spideroak I noticed they weren't open either and you have to sign up for an account and give them personal information to get serious amounts of storage.
No but the way Dropbox and btsync work are way way different. > BitTorrent Sync synchronizes your files using a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol.
They are different, but Dropbox does have some "P2P" behavior with LAN sync:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/137/en
Note: Dropbox employee, but this is public information.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#18I used my dropbox for really important files. But then all the rest is archives and don't mind it getting it next day. All my external hard drives never last more than 2 years. While it is an interesting approach I am concerned about reliability if it is an archive.
I tried out Bitcasa for Mac and it is terrible. My Finder basically stop responding after bitcasa started. I have been working on a simplified version of AWS boto library for glacier, in the goal of making an open source tool like a command line sftp/ftp style access to glacier.
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#19I really liked the implementation listed out on this site. I went through it and it was a great learning experience. You also get a sweet web interface with owncloud.
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/05/23/how-i-created-my-own-p...
Re: Clone Dropbox with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
#20I'm uncomfortable about the opacity of BTsync's privacy architecture. AFAIK even the protocol isn't documented. The code obviously isn't open source.
I wouldn't use it sync anything except Truecrypt volumes. :)