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Not sure I understand your first point. Dropbox isn't the only "filesystem" that's supported. S3, Cloudfiles or anything with an adapter is. "Download all" is

by jmathai 15y ago

Not sure I understand your first point. Dropbox isn't the only "filesystem" that's supported. S3, Cloudfiles or anything with an adapter is. "Download all" is a good solution in your opinion? Maybe you don't have a lot of photos but that doesn't sound terribly useful to me. Does SmugMug provide differential syncing (honest question)? My guess is no. Amazon S3 does. I agree that every service has a gatekeeper when you're talking about the Internet. But in my mind decoupling this way buys you a tremendous amount of advantages at fairly low cost. Hopefully the project gets funded and you can see how great the service is and how big of a problem it solves :).

callmeed 15y ago
Sorry if I'm not being clear ... SmugMug uses S3 for its storage [1]. DropBox also uses S3 for its storage [2]. They are, in essence, both layers/services built on top of S3 (albeit different types of services). So why support one but not the other? [1] http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/ http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-g... [2] http://www.dropbox.com/help/7 http://www.dropbox.com/help/7
- jmathai 15y ago
  Gotcha. In theory SmugMug could be supported as a "storage service" if they have the appropriate APIs. It doesn't make a lot of sense to do that because SmugMug doesn't offer any compelling storage services on top of S3. Their APIs are (from a file system perspective) a subset of S3. Dropbox on the other hand provides sync on top of S3 which could be a big benefit for some users. Personally, I think S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles make the most sense. They are as close to a raw file system API which exists "in the cloud". I mention Dropbox to showcase the flexibility of the idea and more people are probably familiar with what Dropbox is than S3. Thanks for clarifying.

by jmathai 15y ago

callmeed 15y ago

Sorry if I'm not being clear ... SmugMug uses S3 for its storage [1]. DropBox also uses S3 for its storage [2]. They are, in essence, both layers/services built on top of S3 (albeit different types of services). So why support one but not the other? [1] http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/ http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-g... [2] http://www.dropbox.com/help/7 http://www.dropbox.com/help/7

jmathai 15y ago
Gotcha. In theory SmugMug could be supported as a "storage service" if they have the appropriate APIs. It doesn't make a lot of sense to do that because SmugMug doesn't offer any compelling storage services on top of S3. Their APIs are (from a file system perspective) a subset of S3. Dropbox on the other hand provides sync on top of S3 which could be a big benefit for some users. Personally, I think S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles make the most sense. They are as close to a raw file system API which exists "in the cloud". I mention Dropbox to showcase the flexibility of the idea and more people are probably familiar with what Dropbox is than S3. Thanks for clarifying.