Excuse the friendly jibe but you might consider dropping Hostgator next! I really respect and find valuable the idea of OwnCloud, but I have heard so many horror stories about files being deleted, slow sync times and bug fixes being secondary to the development of new features I have been put off. Has it now matured and can be considered more viable? I have been using BitTorrent Sync (with a Raspberry Pi as 24/7 server) personally and have experienced zero issues. I wish it was open source but it is great as an alternative to DropBox if 'owning your data' is important to you.
Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#12Blocked by IT under the category of Pornography. Guess I'll read it later?
My guess a generic domain keyword block of "dork"? Remind me not to register a domain like that for my next must-have business app.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#13> I have about 400GB of data backed up and synced between all my offices onto external drives at each location
I can't even get it to synch 100MB properly. I'm using ownCloud for about a year now and I run into issues all the time. Simply put a Git repo in your ownCloud folder and it will never stop synching.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#14One aspect that is overlooked here is the actual safety of your data. If you feel that your own server has the safety and backup resources of e.g. Amazon (which Dropbox uses), you're probably deluding yourself.
Backup is irrelevant, you can always encrypt it and send to S3. As for safety, well, at least you're a considerably less visible and worthy target than Dropbox. And you can implement systems (e.g., stronger authentication) that Dropbox might disregard since they're targeting a less technical user base.
Personally, I use git-annex as my sync server, and all non-local transmissions are done over SSH using public key authentication, which is something that Dropbox will never implement.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#15Next post: Why I dropped HostGator.com and got
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#16Dropbox secure? A joke. One key to open all.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#17"OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions. The only catch is that you have to run and install OwnCloud on your own server" Your own server which adds its own data limits and pricing restrictions.
> Your own server which adds its own data limits and pricing restrictions.
And potential reliability issues too. The storage infrastructure of something like dropbox will (or at least should) be massively redundant to reduce to near-zero the risk of people losing data due to hardware fault.
With something like OwnCloud you need to provide your own live redundancy and backups if your data is important enough to need them.
Having said that I'm looking at using OwnCloud for myself, and might suggest the group I work for use it too if my experiments with it show it to match out needs. But do be aware of what else services like dropbox provide that you need to manage and support yourself when replacing them with an in-house service.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#18One aspect that is overlooked here is the actual safety of your data. If you feel that your own server has the safety and backup resources of e.g. Amazon (which Dropbox uses), you're probably deluding yourself.
Dropbox overloked safety of data a lot.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#19 > OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions.
I switched to ownCloud for a while and then switched back to Dropbox. I switched back to Dropbox for a couple reasons.
First, ownCloud is written in PHP and the code (and the plugins you could add on) looked pretty janky. The UI was better than the usual open source fair, but still janky. Second, the trouble of having to worry about maintaining backups[1] for the ownCloud data store and server redundancy made the $10 a month I pay Dropbox look a lot more attractive again.
And finally, a lot of iOS apps integrate with Dropbox specifically. I didn't include this as an official third item, because fuck vendor lock-in, but it is nice to have when you're in a walled-garden environment like iOS.
In the end, I decided that I was better off overall sticking with Dropbox and doing a better job of encrypting particularly-sensitive data that resides there. Dropbox has had some security incidents and stability issues, but they've always responded to them in a manner I would consider sufficient.
I'm paying Dropbox for it's service (SaaS, after all), not it's storage. I'm paying them to worry about keeping things up and running. Not because I can't do it myself, but because I want to devote my limited time to other things.
1. Let me explain. I still do backups on the client side with a mix of Time Machine, CarbonCopyCloner, and tar. So my data's safe.
But I still need to worry about backing up the ownCloud instance, as well. Because if that gets munged up, I can't use ownCloud anymore without reinstalling and reconfiguring it. With Dropbox, they worry about the back end, so that I can focus on other things that I want to focus on.
Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud
#20I was also looking to host my own cloud service. I tried OwnCloud (2 weeks ago) and I was fascinated by it... Well until it failed me and lost my test data. There is a major bug in it (try renaming a directory by changing one letter from small to capital).
That being said, I started using BitTorrentSync which is a peer to peer sync and I am happy with it so far and I am still testing it.