
Ask HN: Self-hosted Alternatives to Dropbox? - elcritch
Dropbox is dropping support for syncing on &quot;non-supported&quot; filesystems. I&#x27;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?
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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/](https://www.sparkleshare.org/)

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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/](https://nextcloud.com/)

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

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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.

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phoyd
That would be Seafile ([https://www.seafile.com](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.

~~~
replax
I would highly recommend nextcloud over seafile. Seafile does not appear to
take security seriously in any capacity as can be demonstrated by the
maintainers here:
[https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350)
,
[https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/490](https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/490)

Nextcloud is written in PHP an so many people believe it to be insecure per
default, but the devs are highly capable and put an emphasis on security from
my experience.

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Down_n_Out
If you happen to have a Synology storage device you could also look into their
Drive[0] solution. Offers about the same features as Dropbox.

[0] [https://www.synology.com/en-
us/dsm/feature/drive](https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/drive)

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

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aosaigh
Resilio:
[https://www.resilio.com/individuals/](https://www.resilio.com/individuals/)

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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.

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thinkingemote
"Rysnc and cron"

