The selling point of Dropbox/Google Drive isn't the storage itself, but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced.
So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.
That’s only an issue if you use Dropbox for sharing with non-Dropbox users, rather than for syncing files across devices and accounts, and having an extra versioned copy in the cloud.
Right - you pay for the GUI and the well-balanced user experience.
It's less about, strictly speaking, the storage.
Which is, in the end, true of a lot of tools where the underlying 'things' aren't particularly spectacular but rather it's the user experience that sells it
Yep, I use rsync to sync files / directories between my desktop, laptop and even phone (Android). Also an external drive.
I ended up creating https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu which calls rsync under the hood but helps you build up a valid rsync command with no surprises. It also codifies each of your backup / restore strategies so you're not having to run massively long rsync commands each time. It's 1 shell script with no dependencies except rsync.
Nothing leaves my local network since it's all local file transfers.
Except that for macOS it uses the FileProvider Framework. So files that are rarely accessed get deleted from your local storage and synced back automagically when you access them. Saving space on your disk because on mac you can’t upgrade your ssd without a soldering iron.
> but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced
Which mobile OS would that be?
The big reason I stopped being excited about cloud storage is that on mobile, from what I can tell, none of the major providers care about "folder that syncs" experience. You only get an app that lets you view remote storage. The only proper "folder that syncs" I had working on my phone so far was provided via Syncthing, but maintaining that turned out to be more effort than my tiny attention span can afford these days.
On iOS, Dropbox integrates with the Files app. Since that was added a couple of years ago, I rarely have to open the Dropbox app itself. About the only time is when I want to restore an earlier version of a file.
You can also mark complete folders as “Make Available Offline”, which will keep their contents updated, though I don’t really use that personally.
The biggest benefit of the ios dropbox app is to search through the contents of all files. When accessing from the files app that is not possible, unfortunately.
Wow, I’m surprised. Of all my self-hosting solutions, this needs least maintenance, for me. Recently had to move to a fork of SyncTrazor, because a new project picked up support, but that’s the first time I had to think about it in years. Wish NextCloud and Immich were that easy!
I'm using iOS and macOS. On macOS I have the folder that syncs experience (I'm using Synology Drive, but Dropbox works the same way), on iOS I have the "browse remote files" experience but I can pin files I always want to keep available which is what I want.
Right. It's similar to Windows and Android experience. Thing is, for the latter, I don't want to "pin files I always want to keep available" - I want them to actually exist as files in the shared storage, so other apps can operate on them as if on regular files.
(Unfortunately, both mobile platforms themselves are actively fighting this approach, and instead encourage apps to keep data in private databases and never expose them as actual files.)
I get the pain point, but databases are a much better data model for multi-device, intermittently-connected sync. Filesystems just aren’t designed to be async and conflict-resolving.
My only major complaint with gdrive on Mac (besides Apple and Google but I have to deal with them for work) is that you can’t set the storage folder to an external location like with windows. I don’t want to be constantly loading/unloading media on my internal storage, but I don’t have a choice without janky work arounds. It’s a very frustratingly “Apple” thing to do.
That's a very typical HN/developer response that often underestimates the effort and the interest people have into a self-rolled solution outside of tech / self-hosting circles. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47674176)
Free, opensource, works on computers and phones, can in most cases puncture nat, supports local discovery (lan, multicast).
No googles, no dropboxes, no clouds, no AI training, no "my kid likes the wrong video on youtube, now our whole family lost access to every google account we had, so we lost everything, including family photos", just sync!
This is my go to solution for code sync across macOS laptop, Windows VMs, and Linux VMs to build and run/debug across environments. Unless something has changed, exclusions of build artifacts was always an issue with cloud sync providers.
I have been doing more cross compilation on macOS, copy and run on those other machines lately for prototypes, but for IDE based debugging it’s great to edit local or remote and get it all synced to the machine to run it in seconds.
The only issue I have, with this amazing piece of software that I heavily use across multiple devices, is management of sync failures and exclusions via the UI. I have been using it for long enough to know the tips and tricks but it would be great for the web UI to allow easy management of conflict issues and the ability to mark files/folders as exclusions in a friendly manner.
Given how many fuckups sync had over lifetime of it (at one point it basically asked for re-log every day, at other it just corrupted data/didn't finish sync), no
I’ve gotten used to it and with LLM it’s easier to set up the config without learning all the obscure syntax but on macOS it’s still a very un-native feeling compared to home brew. Having to sudo all the time feels weird for just updating user space apps and configs.
Can you share them? I recently looked for such projects and didn't really find anything that works well.
The issue is that each market sets their own prices and I believe REWE is the only large one where you can fairly easily scrape the product catalogue. I thought about it in a shopping list context, so you'd need to make it location dependent to be useful. But you could do a lot of cool things with it. Like choose a basket of goods and it creates a route for you: "Go to supermarket A and buy goods XYZ, then to supermarket B and buy ABC"
There's this one which got some publicity, doesn't seem to be updated any more but it worked for all these retailers listed and is open source: https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise
I think the unicorn is only for web pages. Things like git api services might be broken independently (and often are!) and they might show up on the status page after some time.
There's so many different models, from hosted to local and there's almost no switching cost as most of them are even api compatible or supported by one of the gateways (Bifrost, LiteLLM,...).
There's many things to worry about but which LLM provider you choose doesn't really lock you in right now.
I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.
Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have had no issues with that either.
It really is… I’ve worked with Gitlab for years and moving to GitHub was like a breath of fresh air, everything is much less cluttered. Not saying it’s perfect, but GitHub just feels simpler
I get the impression that if you're uninterested in either reading enough of the press release to get to the parts where they mention what they did, or navigating to the top-level index for the blog, where what they write about is made very plain, then you're not the type of person who would give any shits about what they write about.
It’s an announcement published for their followers and distributed through their own channels to those people. That it doesn’t make sense when detached from that context and put on HN to people with no knowledge of who they are seems very much irrelevant to the goals of writing the post?
So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.
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