Re: [Hampshire] Dropbox alternative

On Thu, 2012-12-20 at 14:44 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 12:47:55PM +0000, Simon Whitehead wrote:
> > Isnt this a job for FTP for example Filezilla??
>
> Only if you live in 1996. :)

I tried an experimental community project in 2001 and it felt outdated.

> SFTP or FTP-SSL arguably more acceptable, though what people tend to
> want from "cloud storage" is good OS and mobile device integration.
> They want to be able to just drop files into a folder or make a
> change to a file and know it will be distributed out without them
> having to trigger that. I wouldn't say that SFTP provides that.

No, but using other back-end replication will.

> Yes you can lash something together using scripts and inotify. This
> is not what most cloud storage users are thinking of.

Bespoke, pretty, drop and drag requires extra effort. But folders are
universal.

> Unison is a bit better because it will satisfy the encryption angle
> and has pretty good merging support, i.e. if file has changed on
> both sides it will do its best to resolve that without having to ask
> you which version you want to keep. Still not really there from the
> usability angle, given user expectations.
>
> I have made no recommendation because I don't currently use cloud
> storage. Unison and rsync do fit my needs right now. Not so for the
> OP I feel.

I'm about to go with this hardware to make a prototype work for 3 x
Windows, Mac and Andriod users
http://twitter.com/interlinux/status/269156443247214592/photo/1

Q1 2013 has to have a maintenance release window which will go to
SourceForge and Fedora18. The project software may not be of interest to
you, the manual contents might be http://diaser.org

So Samba share without a Domain controller and a folder that's called
archive_me. Contents of this folder enters the back-end replication. Not
cloud, but it could be. How the contents of the folder change, the
report back to users and retrieval is tunable. SSHFS is a way.

> Disaster planning fans should bear in mind that multiple storage
> clouds are backed onto lower level providers such as Amazon S3, e.g.
> both UbuntuOne and Dropbox are on S3. So if S3 is crippled, so are
> at least two major storage clouds that some people may think are
> independent.

...and Amazon Glacier is a almost a direct competitor of the little
Foundation I created and run. I was approached on LinkedIn by one of
their technical Directors a few weeks ago. I dropped the connection
after a few days, there was no reason given to me for the invite.

> Shared fate; no longer just for romance novels.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy

... it's for poetry, code and knowing systems will sometimes bite us
hard and it will hurt;)

Best Regards
Damian


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