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Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

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Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#61

Post by Touche »

cdcarter wrote: post #54
Touche wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better to host it in your own home. Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. All you have to pay for is dynamic dns (which is useful in many other ways). "Maintenance" is a bad criticism. Use some stable distro and run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every couple of months.

> Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. Weird definition of everyone, even in the HN reading crowd. Lot's of twenty-somethings have moved several times in a short amount of time, and tend to ditch the cruft. I know I did.

Then don't do it next time, your old laptop can live as a server for a good 5 years and will still be better than the VPSes you can afford by then.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#62

Post by Touche »

dspillett wrote: post #57
Touche wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better to host it in your own home. Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. All you have to pay for is dynamic dns (which is useful in many other ways). "Maintenance" is a bad criticism. Use some stable distro and run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every couple of months.

> It's better to host it in your own home. With the sterling reliability of the average residential ISP... For what it is worth, home runing is a viable option for many uses: I do run a server or two at home myself but important things are out in external DCs too. > Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox For transfers maybe, but are your really trusting an ancient b…

For backup I just use Amazon Glacier (backups with http://docs.bakthat.io/en/latest/).

No one ever said a DIY solution was going to be as reliable as a proprietary service, just that the relatively low risk is worth it for your freedom. I personally would never use Dropbox since they don't open source their technology.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#63

Post by synchrone »

jgillich wrote: post #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.

I cannot find your github issue about that. Could you paste a link, if you managed to find 10 minutes of your precious time to post the reproduce-scenario during your 1 year long struggle?

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#64

Post by junto »

I run OwnCloud on my Synology NAS at home. The Synology has got dynamic DNS and I have then CNAMED the synology.me address with cloud.mydomain.com. The sync client seems OK to me and I can access my files and contacts remotely. Everything goes over SSL with a free StartSSL cert.

I also use dropbox for work stuff that I don't care about from a privacy perspective.

Overall I'm happy with OwnCloud. Sadly they don't have an officially supported OwnCloud package for Synology, but you can have everything I guess.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#65

Post by CompleteMoron2 »

Just a quick smattering of thoughts:

You can get free DropBox space when you buy android tablets and phones. I think between a tablet and a htcone I scored like 500GB's at Dropbox.

Public cloud is not for sensitive data - its for transferring lame documents and media between places. Usually the people who are worried about security for data in public forums usually dont actually have any data anyone wants to steal.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#66

Post by xb95 »

fbags wrote: post #40
orjan wrote: post #6

One 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.

Two points: 1) Dropbox has many thousands of their own servers, alongside the Amazon. It's not like they're just using raw S3 and nothing else. 2) Dropbox has a history of egregious mistakes which they try to sweep under the rug. Only a very silly person would believe that Arash has suddenly decided to be open and honest with the customers. Remember, when you talk about Dropbox, you're talking about a company that fl…

What's the source on your third paragraph? I want to read the backstory there.

Edit: Bias alert; I work for Dropbox on our infrastructure team. I'm just curious about that particular incident, since it predates me and I'm always curious about these things.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#67

Post by Fomite »

dspillett wrote: post #57
Touche wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better to host it in your own home. Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. All you have to pay for is dynamic dns (which is useful in many other ways). "Maintenance" is a bad criticism. Use some stable distro and run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade once every couple of months.

> It's better to host it in your own home. With the sterling reliability of the average residential ISP... For what it is worth, home runing is a viable option for many uses: I do run a server or two at home myself but important things are out in external DCs too. > Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox For transfers maybe, but are your really trusting an ancient b…

> For transfers maybe, but are your really trusting an ancient box of parts long out of warranty with your long term storage?

This is the one that always gets me. Failure becomes more likely over time. You just dumped your faith in a more failure prone box.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#68

Post by runjake »

shocks wrote: post #41
runjake wrote: post #19

> OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions. There's some pretty huge caveats in the above statement from the article. 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 sou…

If your very first reason for not using ownCloud is "because it's written in PHP" then I'm probably not going to read the rest of your comment.

That's a shame, because you missed the qualifying remainder of that sentence, which that PHP isn't awful, but rather that the code looked janky. This makes me nervous when part of my mission is privacy. It should make your nervous, too.

Some of the 3rd party plugins, such as the Music extension (which was included with ownCloud 5) looks like a security nightmare.

PHP by itself has had some security problems, but combine that with poor programming practices and I avoid it. Again, especially when privacy and security is key. But, I get the impression that you're just here for a PHP battle, so I'll bow out.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#69

Post by kuebelreiter »

If you want to spend your time being your Owncloud admin use it. Security updates, finding reasons for Error 500 after updates and version upgrades - there's always something to do, you never will be bored.

If you just want a solution to sync data with your server use bittorrent sync.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#70

Post by slaman »

Touche wrote: post #61
cdcarter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone has an old computer with more storage space than you can ever afford from Dropbox. Weird definition of everyone, even in the HN reading crowd. Lot's of twenty-somethings have moved several times in a short amount of time, and tend to ditch the cruft. I know I did.

Then don't do it next time, your old laptop can live as a server for a good 5 years and will still be better than the VPSes you can afford by then.

or sell it while it has most of it's value as a laptop and pick up a VPS with a much better internet connection. Or a pi or whatever..
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