6 ms·

Build your own private, encrypted, open-source Dropbox clone

175 points by Tho85 13y ago

emerika 13y ago
Are people looking at bitTorrent Sync? (http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html) I'm uing it on a laptop, a server and my android devices. It works great. Seemless.
- Joeboy 13y ago
  Closed source is a dealbreaker for lots of people.
  - rektide 13y ago
    They can keep the source for all I care, but it's hardly BitTorrent without an open extensible spec.
luisehk 13y ago
I wonder if this is really usable like Dropbox. I tried owncloud which is supposed to be the more stable alternative but it kept replacing new files with old ones, sync took ages and security was weak. I really want to support this kind of projects but they hold me from being productive, which I really need right now.
- Tho85 13y ago
  The underlying sync software (Unison) has been around for years now and is regarded as stable. So syncing should work just fine, although you should keep a backup of your files just in case. You can also use Dropbox and Encbox together if you're unsure: Point your Dropbox installation to ~/Encbox and have Dropbox sync your (then decrypted) files. So you can be sure to have backups, file sharing features, etc. and see if Encbox is stable enough for you.
  - aw3c2 13y ago
    I often have Unison not notice file changes until I repeatedly scan or sometimes even until weeks later. If I new a better alternative I would not use it.
    - Tho85 13y ago
      They use some kind of heuristic to make change detection faster, see their documentation: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/stable/unison-manual.html#updates http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/... Maybe that's the root cause of your issues?
- Wilya 13y ago
  Owncloud client is based on csync, which a quite weak system compared to unison, in terms of file consistency. No idea how well unison performs in constant Dropbox-like usage, but you shouldn't let the flaws of Owncloud deter you: file synchronisation isn't Owncloud's strong point.
- kansface 13y ago
  No, it won't be. Polling the filesystem is not a scalable solution. OsX will hit the file descriptor limit on mostly anything you want to watch. Of course, you can up the limit, but thats a losing battle because poling 10K files per second doesn't work. The correct solution involves using FSEvents (which blows), and system poling when you get an event. Inotify is good enough to get away with no poling. The native windows change watcher isn't bad either. Even if this weren't the case, the value that dropbox provides is far greater than this potential solution for most people- ie, there is quite a bit of room for something to go wrong running your own duct tape dropbox. Syncing 99/100 files is not OK. Syncing 100/100 files, but only after 2 weeks isn't OK either. source: I built my own ducktape dropbox (sortof). https://github.com/Floobits/flegmatic https://github.com/Floobits/flegmatic
highball-it 13y ago
You have to trust the VPS provider.
- Tho85 13y ago
  You don't have to if you use EncFS. All encryption is done client-side. The only thing your VPS provider could do is delete your files, but Unison's backup feature should protect you from losing your files (in a way).
  - bmslieght 13y ago
    Your VPS provider, can in effect, chroot in to your environment, so EncFS is vunerable.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      If encryption is done client-side, the data is still encrypted server-side and chrooting does nothing.
    - Tho85 13y ago
      What do you mean by 'vulnerable'? All encryption is done on your computer/notebook, so a chroot on the server doesn't decrypt the files.
    - pyre 13y ago
      The EncFS is mounted locally (client-side), so the files aren't decrypted at all on the server-side. You're just syncing fully encrypted files.
- muyuu 13y ago
  Yep. This is an important point. I can still follow this guide to create my online-NAS box and use it across devices.
sehrope 13y ago
Nice guide. One nitpick: > Add a user for our project and give him a decent password: Better off not giving the encbox user a password at all and only allow SSH key based login. You can already login to the primary/root account and sudo/su to setup the encbox user and copy SSH keys.
brymaster 13y ago
This should be taken a step further and have a UI and web control panel just like the real dropbox.
- sehrope 13y ago
  Putting aside the work itself of creating a UI (this is just a simple install guide), that's not possible without exposing the encfs keys to the remote server. In this setup the client data is all encrypted before it reaches the server. The server is just a sync point for multiple clients. You could have a UI (web or otherwise) on a separate client but it would have nothing to do with the server. It would just be a client that provides a UI interface to the decrypted encfs filesystem.
  - Tho85 13y ago
    Theoretically, it should be possible to have a web UI running on the server itself. You just need a decent AES implementation in Javascript to do client-side decoding of filenames and files. Any volunteers? :-) Edit: Looks like someone is already working on it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10909500/use-encfs-with-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10909500/use-encfs-with-j...
    - colinsidoti 13y ago
      I've looked into this before and concluded it was possible, although I forget exactly how. I bookmarked https://crypton.io/ https://crypton.io/ and http://peerjs.com/ http://peerjs.com/ . PeerJS is p2p WebRTC, which I believe I chose because I wanted to do secure, real-time p2p file sharing. That isn't 100% relevant for this, but downloading the file over some socket into client-memory then decoding it there sounds like something webrtc could be a good option for. Crypton handles the crypto. I think the biggest thing someone who tackles this needs to realize is that perfecting the crypto doesn't matter 100%. If you could get something working that's doing some kind of encryption/decryption without exposing anything to the server, crypto experts will come in and help secure everything (see: mega) Edit: I should mention that I didn't research this extensively, and better libraries might be (and probably are) available.
tokenizerrr 13y ago
Don't reuse the keys, just generate a different key on each client and add them all to authorized_keys
- Tho85 13y ago
  Good point, I fixed that.
Osmium 13y ago
This looks cool, but of course you can also use encfs directly with Dropbox or, if you prefer a graphical interface, Boxcryptor[1] have a fork of encfs specifically for cloud storage along with some platform-specific apps. [1] https://www.boxcryptor.com https://www.boxcryptor.com
- Tho85 13y ago
  I used that combination before, it works really nice. But at some point I hit the storage limit and had to come up with a self-hosted solution.
Bjoern 13y ago
How does this solution measure up to hosting your own Owncloud or alike? Any upsides / downsides? I'm wondering because many non-technical people need a dead simple solution for this if you want to substitute Dropbox.
- wazoox 13y ago
  From what I've seen, Owncloud doesn't provide encryption (files are lying in the clear on the server); furthermore I didn't dig much into the web app part, but I wouldn't bet it to be extremely robust security-wise.
  - techbob 13y ago
    well said, they don't provide any encryption - and I have not found any public cloud services that could solve the browser encryption issue. If you are willing to experiment with public services, my first bet would be tresorit (however, they have limitations in compatibility until august, when upgrades are coming). I also tried wuala and boxcryptor, but they just did not work for me.
  - tomaac 13y ago
    That is not true. Owncloud provides both SSL and file encryption: http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/configuration/configuration_encryption.html http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/configuratio...
pavs 13y ago
I am using Owncloud, super easy to install[1]. I have a non-us/eu vps storage solution, despite reading others having problem with it, its working great for me. [1] http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/05/16/host-your-own-dropbox-like-cloud-backup-service-under-5-minutes/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/05/16/host-your-own-dropbox-li...
mikevm 13y ago
I'd never heard of Backupsy before, looks very cool! What is special about their VPS offering that makes it so cheap? I mean, from what I can see for an extra $2/month they let you host websites and install anything you want (except torrents, TOR or anything illegal). I've been wanting to have an affordable VPS solution so I could be host my own stuff, and have the freedom to experiment with various development tools, and this might be a decent deal.
- pliu 13y ago
  There is nothing particularly special about Backupsy as far as I can see. Just cheap simple servers with a bunch of disks in them. This type of hardware is very cheap. The software layer is equally simple - seems like just KVM and a dashboard, nothing fancy. So then low cost, low price right. Good combo. However as you can see from the SLA (99.9%), you do have to pay something in the form of reduced redundancy and availability. If, for example, an HP RAID card freaks out and all the VM's get corrupted on your blade, well you are out of luck. That data is gone forever. It's a small risk, but it is a real one (in fact with the P410 they are using, that's actually happened to me before in production). There are lots of other things that can go wrong too. Virtualization is not all rainbows and unicorns. In the end I think it's still a good deal if you need a backup target with phat storage in it. But if you are interested in just trying out stuff, I think Digital Ocean is a better call since they have a higher SLA (99.99%) and probably a better dashboard and it's around the same price. Backupsy, as the name implies, is made for backups.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    DigitalOcean is not really comparable, they only give you 20 GB of disk. I can't use the 250 GB Backupsy gives you, but 100 GB for $5 or 50 for $3, I would sign up yesterday.
    - Spittie 13y ago
      If you're fine with OpenVZ and being in the USA, RamNode (http://www.ramnode.com/index.php http://www.ramnode.com/index.php) offer 50gb for 2$/month and 120gb for 7.50$/month (And it's ssd-cached space). You can even use a coupon like "leb35' to get 35% discount forever. Note: Not affiliate in any way with RamNode, just an happy client.
VuongN 13y ago
One question: how do you share files securely with others? Have you check out our company's free products, http://ncryptedcloud.com http://ncryptedcloud.com? We secure your data before it goes into Dropbox, allow securely sharing and many more features for FREE to all our consumer users! We only charge for things like auditing beyond certain amount of times, single sign-on integrations, enterprise stuff etc. All we want to do is secure this whole cloud mess.
mikevm 13y ago
A few notes on Backupsy from their website: >Will you backup my Backup VPS? > Unfortunately, no. Even though we use a RAID protected setup, there is still a slight chance of data loss due to RAID controller failure. For extreme redundancy you can order 2 backup VPS in different nodes and we can mirror them for you ("Configure it for me" addon should be purchased).
chakalakasp 13y ago
I don't know why this doesn't end up in every thread, but Synology's inexpensive NAS systems have a "be your own cloud" feature built in, with corresponding iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux (I think) and android apps. All in a little box you can keep in your house.
jlgaddis 13y ago
> $ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh encbox@your.vps.com "mkdir ~/.ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" $ ssh-copy-id encbox@your.vps.com Much easier, IMO.
- falcolas 13y ago
  Doesn't exist on all machines which would be capable of using this - namely OSX
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    Good point. It is installed on my MBP but it looks like I installed it via brew.
moe 13y ago
Or, you know, just use Dropbox. And add encryption on top with these two commands: mkdir ~/Dropbox/_ ~/Dropsafe encfs ~/Dropbox/_ ~/Dropsafe Yes, it's as easy as that. On OSX you'll have to 'brew install encfs' first.
- edvinbesic 13y ago
  Interesting, does this allow for incremental updates while encrypted?
  - e12e 13y ago
    Encfs is pretty opaque -- afaik modifying a file will at least change an entire block, possibly the entire file. Two identical files will look completely different (per file IVs) -- so no deduplicaton is possible. But adding and removing files works as expected, so adding a few files to the encfs system, should translate to the same number of files added to the underlying folder.
    - Tho85 13y ago
      EncFS allows to deactivate some of these features at the price of reduced security. The EncFS manpage [1] has a good explanation of all the tunables. If you want to use Boxcryptor, you're even advised to deactivate most of these features [2]. [1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/encfs http://linux.die.net/man/1/encfs [2] https://boxcryptor.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/565934 https://boxcryptor.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/565934
- gasull 13y ago
  Yes, but you still have to install a closed-source Dropbox client in your system.
happywolf 13y ago
If I remember correctly, ZFS has a 'push' feature that could be a good candidate for this purpose
- happywolf 13y ago
  Oops, should be ZFS send. Reference Link: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbinw/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbinw/index.htm...
StavrosK 13y ago
After finding Backupsy (and RamNode, which a commenter suggested), I've found the holy grail of backup solutions. I will write a simple backup script that mounts a remote directory (through SSH or whatever), mounts an EncFS directory on that and rdiff-backups files onto it. This will give you encrypted, snapshotted backups using open-source systems, that are better than Duplicity because you don't have to be creating full backups every so often. If you'd be interested, you can subscribe to my mailing list at http://bit.ly/stavroslist http://bit.ly/stavroslist or follow me on Twitter or something, but please post comments below so I know what functionality to include.
- buro9 13y ago
  I just use Tarsnap for this scenario: http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ What I am looking for is a folder that syncs, but is secure and open source. BitTorrent Sync is the closest to how it should work, but is not open source: http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Tarsnap is ideal, but it's around $27 a month, versus $3.
    - buro9 13y ago
      It's a question of how much you're backing up... my Tarsnap use and cost is very low. I retain off-site encrypted HDD images updated once a month of things like media which constitute the vast majority of my data and do not need daily snapshots.
      - StavrosK 13y ago
        Yeah, I want to back up my media as well (around 90 GB), but I want my backups to just work. Tarsnap would have been fine if not for the cost, so a tool that combines EncFS + SSH + rdiff-backup will be ideal for me.
jfb 13y ago
I applaud this, and other similar efforts (OwnCloud et al) but for me the win with Dropbox is not system to system syncing (for which Unison or rsync works Well Enough for me) but rather as a synchronization service for my mobile devices. This is sadly enough an area where roll-your-own is not going to be able to compete.
- urza 13y ago
  I started using BitSync[1] few days ago to sync and backup some folders in my Android to my PC and Mac. Unfortunately it is not opensource, but is is still better than dropbox, because it does not store my files in cloud and it has better setting - i can choose which folders on my device i want to backup or synchronize. [1] http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Yes, it’s difficult but I don’t think »roll-your-own is not going to be able to compete«. (Disclaimer: I’m interaction designer on ownCloud.) With ownCloud Inc. we have a company, customers and full-time employees. There’s no reason for it to not be able to compete except time needed to catch up to par. And also the code happens to be open source. In that respect it’s a challenge because we don’t have the one centralized reference server where everyone has an account. There are people running it on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows Server, …, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, …, with MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, …, not to mention the different browsers people use it with (we support down to IE8) and operating systems the clients use. Anyway, I digress. ownCloud is also a synchronization service for desktop and mobile devices. In fact we don’t have any system-to-system syncing built-in. The mobile clients and especially the desktop client have gained a lot in stability in the last few weeks – if you’ve tried before, I encourage you to give it another shot. We’re also in the process of reworking the design for the mobile apps. Overall simplification, better visual design. Let me know if you have any specific feedback.

175 points by Tho85 13y ago

Are people looking at bitTorrent Sync? (http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html) I'm uing it on a laptop, a server and my android devices. It works great. Seemless.

Joeboy 13y ago
Closed source is a dealbreaker for lots of people.
- rektide 13y ago
  They can keep the source for all I care, but it's hardly BitTorrent without an open extensible spec.

luisehk 13y ago

I wonder if this is really usable like Dropbox. I tried owncloud which is supposed to be the more stable alternative but it kept replacing new files with old ones, sync took ages and security was weak. I really want to support this kind of projects but they hold me from being productive, which I really need right now.

Tho85 13y ago
The underlying sync software (Unison) has been around for years now and is regarded as stable. So syncing should work just fine, although you should keep a backup of your files just in case. You can also use Dropbox and Encbox together if you're unsure: Point your Dropbox installation to ~/Encbox and have Dropbox sync your (then decrypted) files. So you can be sure to have backups, file sharing features, etc. and see if Encbox is stable enough for you.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  I often have Unison not notice file changes until I repeatedly scan or sometimes even until weeks later. If I new a better alternative I would not use it.
  - Tho85 13y ago
    They use some kind of heuristic to make change detection faster, see their documentation: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/stable/unison-manual.html#updates http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/... Maybe that's the root cause of your issues?
Wilya 13y ago
Owncloud client is based on csync, which a quite weak system compared to unison, in terms of file consistency. No idea how well unison performs in constant Dropbox-like usage, but you shouldn't let the flaws of Owncloud deter you: file synchronisation isn't Owncloud's strong point.
kansface 13y ago
No, it won't be. Polling the filesystem is not a scalable solution. OsX will hit the file descriptor limit on mostly anything you want to watch. Of course, you can up the limit, but thats a losing battle because poling 10K files per second doesn't work. The correct solution involves using FSEvents (which blows), and system poling when you get an event. Inotify is good enough to get away with no poling. The native windows change watcher isn't bad either. Even if this weren't the case, the value that dropbox provides is far greater than this potential solution for most people- ie, there is quite a bit of room for something to go wrong running your own duct tape dropbox. Syncing 99/100 files is not OK. Syncing 100/100 files, but only after 2 weeks isn't OK either. source: I built my own ducktape dropbox (sortof). https://github.com/Floobits/flegmatic https://github.com/Floobits/flegmatic

highball-it 13y ago

You have to trust the VPS provider.

Tho85 13y ago
You don't have to if you use EncFS. All encryption is done client-side. The only thing your VPS provider could do is delete your files, but Unison's backup feature should protect you from losing your files (in a way).
- bmslieght 13y ago
  Your VPS provider, can in effect, chroot in to your environment, so EncFS is vunerable.
  - duaneb 13y ago
    If encryption is done client-side, the data is still encrypted server-side and chrooting does nothing.
  - Tho85 13y ago
    What do you mean by 'vulnerable'? All encryption is done on your computer/notebook, so a chroot on the server doesn't decrypt the files.
  - pyre 13y ago
    The EncFS is mounted locally (client-side), so the files aren't decrypted at all on the server-side. You're just syncing fully encrypted files.
muyuu 13y ago
Yep. This is an important point. I can still follow this guide to create my online-NAS box and use it across devices.

sehrope 13y ago

Nice guide. One nitpick: > Add a user for our project and give him a decent password: Better off not giving the encbox user a password at all and only allow SSH key based login. You can already login to the primary/root account and sudo/su to setup the encbox user and copy SSH keys.

brymaster 13y ago

This should be taken a step further and have a UI and web control panel just like the real dropbox.

sehrope 13y ago
Putting aside the work itself of creating a UI (this is just a simple install guide), that's not possible without exposing the encfs keys to the remote server. In this setup the client data is all encrypted before it reaches the server. The server is just a sync point for multiple clients. You could have a UI (web or otherwise) on a separate client but it would have nothing to do with the server. It would just be a client that provides a UI interface to the decrypted encfs filesystem.
- Tho85 13y ago
  Theoretically, it should be possible to have a web UI running on the server itself. You just need a decent AES implementation in Javascript to do client-side decoding of filenames and files. Any volunteers? :-) Edit: Looks like someone is already working on it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10909500/use-encfs-with-javascript http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10909500/use-encfs-with-j...
  - colinsidoti 13y ago
    I've looked into this before and concluded it was possible, although I forget exactly how. I bookmarked https://crypton.io/ https://crypton.io/ and http://peerjs.com/ http://peerjs.com/ . PeerJS is p2p WebRTC, which I believe I chose because I wanted to do secure, real-time p2p file sharing. That isn't 100% relevant for this, but downloading the file over some socket into client-memory then decoding it there sounds like something webrtc could be a good option for. Crypton handles the crypto. I think the biggest thing someone who tackles this needs to realize is that perfecting the crypto doesn't matter 100%. If you could get something working that's doing some kind of encryption/decryption without exposing anything to the server, crypto experts will come in and help secure everything (see: mega) Edit: I should mention that I didn't research this extensively, and better libraries might be (and probably are) available.

tokenizerrr 13y ago

Don't reuse the keys, just generate a different key on each client and add them all to authorized_keys

Tho85 13y ago
Good point, I fixed that.

Osmium 13y ago

This looks cool, but of course you can also use encfs directly with Dropbox or, if you prefer a graphical interface, Boxcryptor[1] have a fork of encfs specifically for cloud storage along with some platform-specific apps. [1] https://www.boxcryptor.com https://www.boxcryptor.com

Tho85 13y ago
I used that combination before, it works really nice. But at some point I hit the storage limit and had to come up with a self-hosted solution.

Bjoern 13y ago

How does this solution measure up to hosting your own Owncloud or alike? Any upsides / downsides? I'm wondering because many non-technical people need a dead simple solution for this if you want to substitute Dropbox.

wazoox 13y ago
From what I've seen, Owncloud doesn't provide encryption (files are lying in the clear on the server); furthermore I didn't dig much into the web app part, but I wouldn't bet it to be extremely robust security-wise.
- techbob 13y ago
  well said, they don't provide any encryption - and I have not found any public cloud services that could solve the browser encryption issue. If you are willing to experiment with public services, my first bet would be tresorit (however, they have limitations in compatibility until august, when upgrades are coming). I also tried wuala and boxcryptor, but they just did not work for me.
- tomaac 13y ago
  That is not true. Owncloud provides both SSL and file encryption: http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/configuration/configuration_encryption.html http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/configuratio...

pavs 13y ago

I am using Owncloud, super easy to install[1]. I have a non-us/eu vps storage solution, despite reading others having problem with it, its working great for me. [1] http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/05/16/host-your-own-dropbox-like-cloud-backup-service-under-5-minutes/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/05/16/host-your-own-dropbox-li...

mikevm 13y ago

I'd never heard of Backupsy before, looks very cool! What is special about their VPS offering that makes it so cheap? I mean, from what I can see for an extra $2/month they let you host websites and install anything you want (except torrents, TOR or anything illegal). I've been wanting to have an affordable VPS solution so I could be host my own stuff, and have the freedom to experiment with various development tools, and this might be a decent deal.

pliu 13y ago
There is nothing particularly special about Backupsy as far as I can see. Just cheap simple servers with a bunch of disks in them. This type of hardware is very cheap. The software layer is equally simple - seems like just KVM and a dashboard, nothing fancy. So then low cost, low price right. Good combo. However as you can see from the SLA (99.9%), you do have to pay something in the form of reduced redundancy and availability. If, for example, an HP RAID card freaks out and all the VM's get corrupted on your blade, well you are out of luck. That data is gone forever. It's a small risk, but it is a real one (in fact with the P410 they are using, that's actually happened to me before in production). There are lots of other things that can go wrong too. Virtualization is not all rainbows and unicorns. In the end I think it's still a good deal if you need a backup target with phat storage in it. But if you are interested in just trying out stuff, I think Digital Ocean is a better call since they have a higher SLA (99.99%) and probably a better dashboard and it's around the same price. Backupsy, as the name implies, is made for backups.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  DigitalOcean is not really comparable, they only give you 20 GB of disk. I can't use the 250 GB Backupsy gives you, but 100 GB for $5 or 50 for $3, I would sign up yesterday.
  - Spittie 13y ago
    If you're fine with OpenVZ and being in the USA, RamNode (http://www.ramnode.com/index.php http://www.ramnode.com/index.php) offer 50gb for 2$/month and 120gb for 7.50$/month (And it's ssd-cached space). You can even use a coupon like "leb35' to get 35% discount forever. Note: Not affiliate in any way with RamNode, just an happy client.

VuongN 13y ago

One question: how do you share files securely with others? Have you check out our company's free products, http://ncryptedcloud.com http://ncryptedcloud.com? We secure your data before it goes into Dropbox, allow securely sharing and many more features for FREE to all our consumer users! We only charge for things like auditing beyond certain amount of times, single sign-on integrations, enterprise stuff etc. All we want to do is secure this whole cloud mess.

mikevm 13y ago

A few notes on Backupsy from their website: >Will you backup my Backup VPS? > Unfortunately, no. Even though we use a RAID protected setup, there is still a slight chance of data loss due to RAID controller failure. For extreme redundancy you can order 2 backup VPS in different nodes and we can mirror them for you ("Configure it for me" addon should be purchased).

chakalakasp 13y ago

I don't know why this doesn't end up in every thread, but Synology's inexpensive NAS systems have a "be your own cloud" feature built in, with corresponding iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux (I think) and android apps. All in a little box you can keep in your house.

jlgaddis 13y ago

> $ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh encbox@your.vps.com "mkdir ~/.ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" $ ssh-copy-id encbox@your.vps.com Much easier, IMO.

falcolas 13y ago
Doesn't exist on all machines which would be capable of using this - namely OSX
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  Good point. It is installed on my MBP but it looks like I installed it via brew.

moe 13y ago

Or, you know, just use Dropbox. And add encryption on top with these two commands: mkdir ~/Dropbox/_ ~/Dropsafe encfs ~/Dropbox/_ ~/Dropsafe Yes, it's as easy as that. On OSX you'll have to 'brew install encfs' first.

edvinbesic 13y ago
Interesting, does this allow for incremental updates while encrypted?
- e12e 13y ago
  Encfs is pretty opaque -- afaik modifying a file will at least change an entire block, possibly the entire file. Two identical files will look completely different (per file IVs) -- so no deduplicaton is possible. But adding and removing files works as expected, so adding a few files to the encfs system, should translate to the same number of files added to the underlying folder.
  - Tho85 13y ago
    EncFS allows to deactivate some of these features at the price of reduced security. The EncFS manpage [1] has a good explanation of all the tunables. If you want to use Boxcryptor, you're even advised to deactivate most of these features [2]. [1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/encfs http://linux.die.net/man/1/encfs [2] https://boxcryptor.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/565934 https://boxcryptor.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/565934
gasull 13y ago
Yes, but you still have to install a closed-source Dropbox client in your system.

happywolf 13y ago

If I remember correctly, ZFS has a 'push' feature that could be a good candidate for this purpose

happywolf 13y ago
Oops, should be ZFS send. Reference Link: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbinw/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbinw/index.htm...

StavrosK 13y ago

After finding Backupsy (and RamNode, which a commenter suggested), I've found the holy grail of backup solutions. I will write a simple backup script that mounts a remote directory (through SSH or whatever), mounts an EncFS directory on that and rdiff-backups files onto it. This will give you encrypted, snapshotted backups using open-source systems, that are better than Duplicity because you don't have to be creating full backups every so often. If you'd be interested, you can subscribe to my mailing list at http://bit.ly/stavroslist http://bit.ly/stavroslist or follow me on Twitter or something, but please post comments below so I know what functionality to include.

buro9 13y ago
I just use Tarsnap for this scenario: http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ What I am looking for is a folder that syncs, but is secure and open source. BitTorrent Sync is the closest to how it should work, but is not open source: http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Tarsnap is ideal, but it's around $27 a month, versus $3.
  - buro9 13y ago
    It's a question of how much you're backing up... my Tarsnap use and cost is very low. I retain off-site encrypted HDD images updated once a month of things like media which constitute the vast majority of my data and do not need daily snapshots.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      Yeah, I want to back up my media as well (around 90 GB), but I want my backups to just work. Tarsnap would have been fine if not for the cost, so a tool that combines EncFS + SSH + rdiff-backup will be ideal for me.

jfb 13y ago

I applaud this, and other similar efforts (OwnCloud et al) but for me the win with Dropbox is not system to system syncing (for which Unison or rsync works Well Enough for me) but rather as a synchronization service for my mobile devices. This is sadly enough an area where roll-your-own is not going to be able to compete.

urza 13y ago
I started using BitSync[1] few days ago to sync and backup some folders in my Android to my PC and Mac. Unfortunately it is not opensource, but is is still better than dropbox, because it does not store my files in cloud and it has better setting - i can choose which folders on my device i want to backup or synchronize. [1] http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
jancborchardt 13y ago
Yes, it’s difficult but I don’t think »roll-your-own is not going to be able to compete«. (Disclaimer: I’m interaction designer on ownCloud.) With ownCloud Inc. we have a company, customers and full-time employees. There’s no reason for it to not be able to compete except time needed to catch up to par. And also the code happens to be open source. In that respect it’s a challenge because we don’t have the one centralized reference server where everyone has an account. There are people running it on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows Server, …, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, …, with MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, …, not to mention the different browsers people use it with (we support down to IE8) and operating systems the clients use. Anyway, I digress. ownCloud is also a synchronization service for desktop and mobile devices. In fact we don’t have any system-to-system syncing built-in. The mobile clients and especially the desktop client have gained a lot in stability in the last few weeks – if you’ve tried before, I encourage you to give it another shot. We’re also in the process of reworking the design for the mobile apps. Overall simplification, better visual design. Let me know if you have any specific feedback.