Dropbox and similar

Posted Apr 30, 2009 15:22 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643)
Parent article: Reopening iFolder

Dropbox isn't that useful for Linux, as it doesn't preserve permissions (as I found out to my cost ...), and I found it wasn't possible to get it to work reliably, though others have found it works fine. SpiderOak (see http://spideroak.com) is a lot more useful for me - it's a backup client and service primarily, but has recently introduced syncing. Pricing is similar to Dropbox so it's reasonable for individual home users.

For my needs this is a lot more useful - SpiderOak also doesn't force all clients to sync with all data on all other clients, which is what Dropbox does, and causes performance and security issues if you have some large data that should not be present on all clients. It has a Python client so you can use the same tool on Mac or Windows, and it also works nicely under KDE (and probably GNOME) without mandating use of Nautilus.

Dropbox and similar

Posted Apr 30, 2009 21:02 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Spideroak is pretty cool. I just tried it out based on your recommendation. Some thoughts:

- Setting up synchronized folders is more of a hassle than it should be
- It only scans once every hour. That's a pretty big window to lose data!
- It can't scan any faster than every 5 minutes.
- The UI is graphically heavy and feels slow (especially the tray menu)

Other than that, no complaints. It's definitely better than Dropbox. Guess I'll try ifolder next.