8 ms·

No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CV

No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
montecarl 8y ago
Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  Are you telling me that I could build a startup with 3 lines of bash? (EDIT: and a fancy easy windows version)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zak 8y ago
    A great many successful tech companies can be described in terms of more consumer-friendly Unix tools. Slack has the better part of a billion dollars in funding for what's essentially resource-hungry IRC with pictures. Dropbox does little you couldn't accomplish with a server and rsync. What I'm really eager to see is git for everyone else.
    - exikyut 8y ago
      What would "everyone else" do with Git? It's a Rube Goldberg solution implementing a highly specific set of ways to do file versioning. Most cloud storage providers offer rudimentary versioning; are you referring to the idea of promoting commits to being first-class? It would need to be baked into Word, Excel and similar, and those tools already have builtin version tracking, as horrible(?) as it is, so... :/
      - Zak 8y ago
        People I know who definitely have this problem tend to work in creative fields - especially musicians and (digital) visual artists. They almost universally have a bunch of files with names like project_final2_revised_reallyfinal3_with_edits_from_sally.psd. Of course, a solution that works well with all the different binary file formats people in those fields use wouldn't be easy.
        exikyut 8y ago
        Ah, that. Yes, absolutely I'd love for a solution that fixes that. It would definitely need to work with large files though, which categorically precludes Git. The first point, I think, would be building a delta engine with case-specific code for the most common ubiquitous file formats, like docx, xlsx, psd, etc. Of course it wouldn't be able to be perfect with everything but it would certainly be better than eg just recompressing each version or something equally naive. The UX would be the next major hurdle. Time Machine is a good example of the kind of simplicity that would be needed, but it would need to be a have a bit more surface area to be applicable and useful to all scenarios. One other feature that comes to mind, which would be incredibly difficult to get right but probably critical, would be useful version diffing. I think keeping this simple and just building something that can do $anything->SVG (with maybe cheats where bunches of the SVG is mostly just a bitmap in certain cases) and then doing something fast on the SVG (and/or its bitmap contents...) would probably be the most viable target.
        Zak 8y ago
        It think it does need branching and collaboration. There needs to be a way for Sally to contribute those edits, and they might not actually make it in to the final result. No doubt there would be a learning curve. I think that's OK. The target market here is serious users who already dedicate time to learning professional tools like Photoshop.
        exikyut 8y ago
        Oh no. Now you need full file format parsing so that you can resolve merge conflicts. :( That would take years to get anywhere with ._. The diffing idea I suggested above is just manageable, a la macOS Preview, with hacks. Branching requires folding-back-in, and that's not just a case of "A or B", it's a case of "A, B and C conflict with D and E, while F G and H are okay," where I could then say "save B and E but drop F". If B is a layer, E is an imported asset and F is a custom filter... you get the picture. You need a reimplementation of Photoshop (halting problem). :/ Sad that everyone hates GIMP. But... hmm, this could get folded into Blender, and then make the rest of the industry jealous.......
    - nlawalker 8y ago
      >> git for everyone else When you simplify and generalize git to the point where "everyone else" can use it, you get Apple's Time Machine and Windows' File History. I'm not that familiar with Time Machine, but if File History had a more visible interface that you could use to easily "checkpoint" individual documents or directories on demand, you'd pretty much be there. Branching is too complicated for most people to work with and overkill for most scenarios.
    - antoineMoPa 8y ago
      What about grep/sed/find for everyone else? Also, to get more ideas: echo "Make a startup with "$(ls /bin /usr/bin | sort -R | head -n 3)
- api 8y ago
  It really sums up nerds' lack of comprehension of the importance of user experience. It's like the UX version of the apocryphal "640k is all anyone will ever need."
  - pjc50 8y ago
    The other famous one of those is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
    - vxNsr 8y ago
      I like it. iTunes, for those that haven't used a Mac, is REALLY slick. This has aged gloriously, thank you!
      - OskarS 8y ago
        Back in the day, it was pretty slick!
      - leemailll 8y ago
        Back in the day, iTunes is the best music manager. Now it still is a great one.
        omegote 8y ago
        Lol what.
        binomialxenon 8y ago
        I used iTunes from about 2007 through 2014 and it was trash throughout that period. I doubt it's gotten any better.
    - Alex3917 8y ago
      The first iPod was terrible though and sold poorly. The 3G was the first good model, and they didn’t start taking off until the 4G. History only proves that his analysis was completely correct.
- rayiner 8y ago
  It’s a really great example of worse is better.[1] We went from sophisticated network file system to a daemon that destroys your battery life (at least on Mac) watching for file changes in a directory. [1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  - mi_lk 8y ago
    Don't know what you're talking about. Dropbox doesn't ruin my battery on my Mac.
  - laumars 8y ago
    FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that pre-TCP/IP protocols like FTP suffer from.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system. I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution to market. If you were trying to make a “good” solution to the problem addressed by Drop Box, it probably would not look like Drop Box. For example, you’d do a real network file system that wouldn’t need to do a binary diff of the file each time to see what changed, because it would have access to the block level changes at the file system layer.[1] You'd have file locking in the protocol (like CFS), and could sync data from a locked file instead of waiting for the lock to be released.[1] It also probably wouldn’t have made Houston a billionaire because who is going to install a kernel driver off the internet? But on the flip side, Dropbox almost certainly killed much of the interest in real network file systems, because it is good enough. Which is why we’re all using an internet powered by Javascript, Electron apps on the desktop, etc. Worse is better. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-file https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-f... [2] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing
- techopoly 8y ago
  I thought it sounded familiar!
- test6554 8y ago
  The dhouston on that YC post is this guy now: Andrew W. Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur who is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is ~$3 billion.
michaels9876 8y ago
Or just use Google Drive
- kbumsik 8y ago
  Sorry, Google Drive doesn't support Linux.
  - hatsunearu 8y ago
    https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-google-drive-linux-client-is-coming/ https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go... And famously so.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    No official support, but you can easily access the content read/write in multiple ways. I've used such a few years ago with a FUSE module, written in OCaml. The only complicated, annoying thing was getting authentication to work.
    - kbumsik 8y ago
      I've heard of it but is that reliable? I meant I'm a bit afraid of loosing data by using unofficial programs.
yread 8y ago
Reference for the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
srslack 8y ago
More seriously: Syncthing exists, and it is beautiful. I set my grandmother up with Synctrayzor and she doesn't know the difference between that and Dropbox. It is missing the ability to share things with a direct link, or share a repository or folder "easily" (read: in the same way it's done with Dropbox), but the trade off has been worth it for me.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Which cloud backend do you have it sync to?
  - vetinari 8y ago
    None. You run it on your machines and they will sync among themselves. No need for any cloud backend. Some people with Synology or QNAP run an instance on their NAS.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      But I (and I suspect quite a few other people) want a cloud backend to cover both the disaster-recovery cases and syncing while outside my LAN.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        1) you can sync with a device inside your LAN, even if you are outside, with global discovery (enabled by default). 2) you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.
        amyjess 8y ago
        > you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider. How much would it cost to hire an admin to set up and maintain that instance? The whole point of Dropbox is that I don't have to do any work.
pjc50 8y ago
The modern alternative is probably Syncthing. I intermittently maintain a list of these things at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-clouds.md https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... ; none of them have ever been precisely what I wanted. The cheap alternative to Dropbox with Linux support you want was "Hubic" from OVH (edit: now discontinued)
- byproxy 8y ago
  How about Keybase? It has a pretty seamless files experience, I find. Open source, end-to-end encryption, Windows client, painless sync, free for 250GB...
  - bantunes 8y ago
    Stores your private keys, though.
    - byproxy 8y ago
      Well, according to this, they can't read your data. "These folders are encrypted using only your device-specific keys and mine. The Keybase servers do not have private keys that can read this data. Nor can they inject any public keys into this process, to trick you into encrypting for extra parties. Your and my key additions and removals are signed by us into a public merkle tree, which in turn is hashed into the Bitcoin block chain to prevent a forking attack. Here's a screenshot of my 7 device keys and 9 public identities, and how they're all related." https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
  - ahnick 8y ago
    Completely agree. I'm not sure why someone would choose Dropbox over Keybase nowadays.
    - skrebbel 8y ago
      Continuity? I mean, does Keybase have a business model yet? Or is it still "$bigshot_vc who is friends with the CEO believes a few crypto/security gambles are in order"? Not meant critically, I love that they exist and found funding. It's just, as long as the model is "once the privacy shit hits the fan in some widely published scandal, we'll be the one that's ahead" there's only two outcomes: 1. It doesn't happen soon enough and Keybase runs out of runway, or 2. It happens, one of the many Keybase products becomes wildly popular because of it, and Keybase will ditch the others because "yada yada focus core business".
fuzzy2 8y ago
In case anyone is wondering if there truly is something like Dropbox (delta sync, desktop app, mobile app, web interface, ...): There is. It’s Seafile. The Docker image is reasonably easy to set up and run.
dekhn 8y ago
I spent about a year of my life trying to get WebDavFS (backed by apache mod dav svn) working. I want that year back.
ekianjo 8y ago
Or you can use Syncthing instead, you know.
csomar 8y ago
What? No! The whole idea of paying dropbox 10 bucks per month is to get a ready-made functioning solution. It is not like they are not implementing a feature but removing one.

No problem, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

montecarl 8y ago

Just in case anyone doesn't recognize this quote, it is from the 2007 hacker news post about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

antoineMoPa 8y ago
Are you telling me that I could build a startup with 3 lines of bash? (EDIT: and a fancy easy windows version)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Zak 8y ago
  A great many successful tech companies can be described in terms of more consumer-friendly Unix tools. Slack has the better part of a billion dollars in funding for what's essentially resource-hungry IRC with pictures. Dropbox does little you couldn't accomplish with a server and rsync. What I'm really eager to see is git for everyone else.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    What would "everyone else" do with Git? It's a Rube Goldberg solution implementing a highly specific set of ways to do file versioning. Most cloud storage providers offer rudimentary versioning; are you referring to the idea of promoting commits to being first-class? It would need to be baked into Word, Excel and similar, and those tools already have builtin version tracking, as horrible(?) as it is, so... :/
    - Zak 8y ago
      People I know who definitely have this problem tend to work in creative fields - especially musicians and (digital) visual artists. They almost universally have a bunch of files with names like project_final2_revised_reallyfinal3_with_edits_from_sally.psd. Of course, a solution that works well with all the different binary file formats people in those fields use wouldn't be easy.
      - exikyut 8y ago
        Ah, that. Yes, absolutely I'd love for a solution that fixes that. It would definitely need to work with large files though, which categorically precludes Git. The first point, I think, would be building a delta engine with case-specific code for the most common ubiquitous file formats, like docx, xlsx, psd, etc. Of course it wouldn't be able to be perfect with everything but it would certainly be better than eg just recompressing each version or something equally naive. The UX would be the next major hurdle. Time Machine is a good example of the kind of simplicity that would be needed, but it would need to be a have a bit more surface area to be applicable and useful to all scenarios. One other feature that comes to mind, which would be incredibly difficult to get right but probably critical, would be useful version diffing. I think keeping this simple and just building something that can do $anything->SVG (with maybe cheats where bunches of the SVG is mostly just a bitmap in certain cases) and then doing something fast on the SVG (and/or its bitmap contents...) would probably be the most viable target.
        Zak 8y ago
        It think it does need branching and collaboration. There needs to be a way for Sally to contribute those edits, and they might not actually make it in to the final result. No doubt there would be a learning curve. I think that's OK. The target market here is serious users who already dedicate time to learning professional tools like Photoshop.
        exikyut 8y ago
        Oh no. Now you need full file format parsing so that you can resolve merge conflicts. :( That would take years to get anywhere with ._. The diffing idea I suggested above is just manageable, a la macOS Preview, with hacks. Branching requires folding-back-in, and that's not just a case of "A or B", it's a case of "A, B and C conflict with D and E, while F G and H are okay," where I could then say "save B and E but drop F". If B is a layer, E is an imported asset and F is a custom filter... you get the picture. You need a reimplementation of Photoshop (halting problem). :/ Sad that everyone hates GIMP. But... hmm, this could get folded into Blender, and then make the rest of the industry jealous.......
  - nlawalker 8y ago
    >> git for everyone else When you simplify and generalize git to the point where "everyone else" can use it, you get Apple's Time Machine and Windows' File History. I'm not that familiar with Time Machine, but if File History had a more visible interface that you could use to easily "checkpoint" individual documents or directories on demand, you'd pretty much be there. Branching is too complicated for most people to work with and overkill for most scenarios.
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    What about grep/sed/find for everyone else? Also, to get more ideas: echo "Make a startup with "$(ls /bin /usr/bin | sort -R | head -n 3)
api 8y ago
It really sums up nerds' lack of comprehension of the importance of user experience. It's like the UX version of the apocryphal "640k is all anyone will ever need."
- pjc50 8y ago
  The other famous one of those is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
  - vxNsr 8y ago
    I like it. iTunes, for those that haven't used a Mac, is REALLY slick. This has aged gloriously, thank you!
    - OskarS 8y ago
      Back in the day, it was pretty slick!
    - leemailll 8y ago
      Back in the day, iTunes is the best music manager. Now it still is a great one.
      - omegote 8y ago
        Lol what.
      - binomialxenon 8y ago
        I used iTunes from about 2007 through 2014 and it was trash throughout that period. I doubt it's gotten any better.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    The first iPod was terrible though and sold poorly. The 3G was the first good model, and they didn’t start taking off until the 4G. History only proves that his analysis was completely correct.
rayiner 8y ago
It’s a really great example of worse is better.[1] We went from sophisticated network file system to a daemon that destroys your battery life (at least on Mac) watching for file changes in a directory. [1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- mi_lk 8y ago
  Don't know what you're talking about. Dropbox doesn't ruin my battery on my Mac.
- laumars 8y ago
  FTP is neither sophisticated nor a network file system. Frankly I'd take Dropbox over FTP any day of the week - FTP needs to die. Thankfully your options are not limited to either Dropbox or FTP. Thus people who want simplicity can have Dropbox (or similar) and people who want control can have sshfs or any number of other tools out there that require some assembly but also don't suffer from the numerous problems that pre-TCP/IP protocols like FTP suffer from.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    I’m not talking about FTP, which isn’t a network file system. I’m talking about NFS, AFS, and sucessors in that line of development. E.g. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/snehcp/coda-file-system. I’m literally talking about the theory of the paper by Richard Gabriel (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html) which is that worse solutions often win because it takes too much time to bring a good solution to market. If you were trying to make a “good” solution to the problem addressed by Drop Box, it probably would not look like Drop Box. For example, you’d do a real network file system that wouldn’t need to do a binary diff of the file each time to see what changed, because it would have access to the block level changes at the file system layer.[1] You'd have file locking in the protocol (like CFS), and could sync data from a locked file instead of waiting for the lock to be released.[1] It also probably wouldn’t have made Houston a billionaire because who is going to install a kernel driver off the internet? But on the flip side, Dropbox almost certainly killed much of the interest in real network file systems, because it is good enough. Which is why we’re all using an internet powered by Javascript, Electron apps on the desktop, etc. Worse is better. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-file https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/upload-entire-f... [2] https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing https://www.dropbox.com/help/syncing-uploads/stuck-syncing
techopoly 8y ago
I thought it sounded familiar!
test6554 8y ago
The dhouston on that YC post is this guy now: Andrew W. Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur who is best known for being the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes magazine, his net worth is ~$3 billion.

michaels9876 8y ago

Or just use Google Drive

kbumsik 8y ago
Sorry, Google Drive doesn't support Linux.
- hatsunearu 8y ago
  https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-google-drive-linux-client-is-coming/ https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go... And famously so.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  No official support, but you can easily access the content read/write in multiple ways. I've used such a few years ago with a FUSE module, written in OCaml. The only complicated, annoying thing was getting authentication to work.
  - kbumsik 8y ago
    I've heard of it but is that reliable? I meant I'm a bit afraid of loosing data by using unofficial programs.

yread 8y ago

Reference for the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

srslack 8y ago

More seriously: Syncthing exists, and it is beautiful. I set my grandmother up with Synctrayzor and she doesn't know the difference between that and Dropbox. It is missing the ability to share things with a direct link, or share a repository or folder "easily" (read: in the same way it's done with Dropbox), but the trade off has been worth it for me.

pjc50 8y ago
Which cloud backend do you have it sync to?
- vetinari 8y ago
  None. You run it on your machines and they will sync among themselves. No need for any cloud backend. Some people with Synology or QNAP run an instance on their NAS.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    But I (and I suspect quite a few other people) want a cloud backend to cover both the disaster-recovery cases and syncing while outside my LAN.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      1) you can sync with a device inside your LAN, even if you are outside, with global discovery (enabled by default). 2) you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider.
      - amyjess 8y ago
        > you can run your own off-site instance, that can be hosted with your favourite cloud provider. How much would it cost to hire an admin to set up and maintain that instance? The whole point of Dropbox is that I don't have to do any work.

pjc50 8y ago

The modern alternative is probably Syncthing. I intermittently maintain a list of these things at https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-clouds.md https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... ; none of them have ever been precisely what I wanted. The cheap alternative to Dropbox with Linux support you want was "Hubic" from OVH (edit: now discontinued)

byproxy 8y ago
How about Keybase? It has a pretty seamless files experience, I find. Open source, end-to-end encryption, Windows client, painless sync, free for 250GB...
- bantunes 8y ago
  Stores your private keys, though.
  - byproxy 8y ago
    Well, according to this, they can't read your data. "These folders are encrypted using only your device-specific keys and mine. The Keybase servers do not have private keys that can read this data. Nor can they inject any public keys into this process, to trick you into encrypting for extra parties. Your and my key additions and removals are signed by us into a public merkle tree, which in turn is hashed into the Bitcoin block chain to prevent a forking attack. Here's a screenshot of my 7 device keys and 9 public identities, and how they're all related." https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
- ahnick 8y ago
  Completely agree. I'm not sure why someone would choose Dropbox over Keybase nowadays.
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    Continuity? I mean, does Keybase have a business model yet? Or is it still "$bigshot_vc who is friends with the CEO believes a few crypto/security gambles are in order"? Not meant critically, I love that they exist and found funding. It's just, as long as the model is "once the privacy shit hits the fan in some widely published scandal, we'll be the one that's ahead" there's only two outcomes: 1. It doesn't happen soon enough and Keybase runs out of runway, or 2. It happens, one of the many Keybase products becomes wildly popular because of it, and Keybase will ditch the others because "yada yada focus core business".

fuzzy2 8y ago

In case anyone is wondering if there truly is something like Dropbox (delta sync, desktop app, mobile app, web interface, ...): There is. It’s Seafile. The Docker image is reasonably easy to set up and run.

dekhn 8y ago

I spent about a year of my life trying to get WebDavFS (backed by apache mod dav svn) working. I want that year back.

ekianjo 8y ago

Or you can use Syncthing instead, you know.

csomar 8y ago

What? No! The whole idea of paying dropbox 10 bucks per month is to get a ready-made functioning solution. It is not like they are not implementing a feature but removing one.