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Ask HN: Self-hosted Alternatives to Dropbox?

11 points by elcritch ↗ HN
Dropbox is dropping support for syncing on "non-supported" filesystems. I'm a paying customer for Dropbox, but would like to have an option for self-hostable file syncing systems to scale down my reliance on Dropbox. Best recommendations?

15 comments

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savethefuture
rsync combined with some sort of cron or filesystem event watcher?
tinktank
I see what you did there
savethefuture
What did I do?
tinktank
I thought you were making a humorous reference to the comment trashing dropbox when it was shown on hn.
phoyd
That would be Seafile (https://www.seafile.com). Has a desktop sync client (like Dropbox), a Web interface which has all kind of useful features (like upload-only links) and a mobile client which actually works.
LinuxBender
Complex: Nextcloud [1] Simple: Chroot SFTP + lftp [2]

Nextcloud encrypts each users files, so you can let your friends use it too.

SFTP is simpler and must faster to set up and much lighter weight. You could create accounts for friends, but it's up to them to encrypt their files at rest.

Both are self hosted. Nextcloud requires a bunch of dependencies, or using their docker image. SFTP is already on any linux VM you spin up.

[1] - https://nextcloud.com/

[2] - https://tinyvpn.org/sftp/#lftp

elcritch
Do you know the state of Nextcloud vs Seafile vs Sparkleshare? Wasn't one of them a new fork of a previous one? The idea of a client seems nice (especially getting access on iPhone/tablet).

I've done long ago ftp in the past, but I like auto-syncing my files to provide redundancy. Though using ZeroTier it's pretty easy to sync between my devices. Especially as I use ZFS, so `zfs send | ssh othernode.home zfs receive` is pretty nice.

Anyone use https://www.resilio.com/ (previously Bittorrent Sync)?

LinuxBender
Nextcloud was a fork of Owncloud. There are a bunch of blogs that compare the various soltuions if you search for "Nextcloud vs Seafile vs Sparkleshare". I've only set up Nextcloud once, after watching a co-worker deploy it. I appreciated that it is self hosted and supports many cloud storage options. As to which is better suited for your needs, you would want to research all of them.

My preference is Chroot SFTP + the LFTP client. It's the fastest sync I have ever used and trivial to set up both client and server. You can get auto-syncing with inotify or a cron job in this manor.

daxat_staglatz
Sparkleshare [0]:

    SparkleShare creates a special folder on your computer.
    You can add remotely hosted folders (or "projects") to
    this folder. These projects will be automatically kept
    in sync with both the host and all of your peers when
    someone adds, removes or edits a file.

    SparkleShare uses the version control system Git under
    the hood, so setting up a host yourself is relatively
    easy. Using your own host gives you more privacy and
    control, as well as lots of cheap storage space and
    higher transfer speeds. We've made a simple script that
    does the hard work for you.
[0] https://www.sparkleshare.org/
ioddly
I'm incredibly pleased with Syncthing. I use a small VPS with backups to cover the passive backup angle.

Requires minimal config, uses LAN if available, also supports multiple folders and ignores. I can store all my npm using projects on there now, and I can "spin up" a new computer very quickly by just syncing my config folder.

ticktockten
Nextcloud works really well, I use that on scaleway for a really cheap setup!