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).