1 Dropbox_replacement_with_owncloud_unison_and_bup
Anthony Callegaro edited this page 2012-05-25 15:56:39 +00:00

Dropbox replacement with owncloud unison and bup

This is a draft

When Dropbox was first released I thought this was a great idea and was particularly interested in the following features :

  • continuous backup (every file modifications will trigger an upload to the server)
  • rsync-like transfers (sends only the difference between 2 versions to limit bandwidth usage)
  • versioning (all files are versioned and so you can return to a previous revision of a file)
  • allow files sharing with friends/public

Unfortunately Dropbox is not open source and does not allow you to run the server part on your own machines. Which means that you need to put your trust in the company running Dropbox which is based in the US and so subject to the patriot act. Of course you could technically encrypt your files before sending them to Dropbox but that would make the GUI and the file versioning unusable.

Basically I wanted a solution that allows me to :

  • continuously transfer my files to my own server over a secure link
  • have some sort of file versioning to roll back to previous revision of a file
    The nice GUI and the file sharing ability could wait.

I ended up using some custom scripts with Unison without being completely satisfied of the result as Unison is not a SCM (Source Code Management) tool. The versioning works by simply making a copy of the file, which becomes very IO intensive when modifying big files often (like a big mbox file for example).