Open Source Alternative To Dropbox?

garry_g writes "While 'the cloud' may be one of the major buzzwords of the Internet industry, anybody concerned with security and privacy will most likely not touch it with a 10-foot pole. While I am guilty of using Dropbox for occasional data storage or quick picture snaps with my Android phone, I do watch out not to store anything important on there (or incriminating), no matter what the "privacy policy" may be. I was wondering: what useful alternative is there to Dropbox on the FOSS market, which will allow access by both windows/linux boxes, but also mobile devices (specifically Android). I know there are front-end add ons for Windows (and Linux tools of course) e.g. for SVN, but most likely no implementations for mobile use as far as I can tell... And, of course, the backend should run on a Linux box ;)"

Comments

Sparkleshare

[Moderator]

Sparkleshare is still under development, and it seems to have the most traction of any user-friendly project. When released, it will be the open-source Dropbox replacement.

I agree though, it's very hard to get rid of the convenience of Dropbox. Not just for saving files, but for syncing your configuration across machines (save your .dotFiles in ~/Dropbox and then symlink to ~/). But when they refuse to support the BSD's (2 out of the 4 machines I regularly work on), and their Linux implementation starting requiring disabling SELinux, they pretty much did it to themselves. Not to mention the whole thing where the Dropbox CTO admitted they could look at your files if they wanted.

Hosted Alternatives

[slifox]

There are some decent-looking hosted alternatives to dropbox which do client-side encryption. I've looked into this a bit, but I haven't tried any of these yet, so YMMV...

One particularly interesting one is TarSnap. The best part is the client is OSS, so you can verify that encryption is done properly (strong & client-side). You could even reverse the protocol and design your own server software, if you want.
http://www.tarsnap.com/

Another interesting one is SpiderOak. However their client is not OSS, so you have to trust that they're doing the encryption properly
https://spideroak.com/

Here are some other potential hosts, but I'm not sure exactly how proper the encryption is:
http://www.boxcryptor.com/
http://syncplicity.com/products/

ownCloud or Wuala

[DVega]

On the open-source front, the only option I know is ownCloud. It provides the software to build your 'Cloud' storage, but you must provide your own hardware.

On the other side, you can try Wuala. It is not Open Source, but it encrypts all your files before uploading them. There are clients for almost every platform.

ownCloud

[reldruH]

Sounds like you're looking for ownCloud. It's still under heavy development but the file storage functions work very well and it's accessible on Mac, Windows & Linux via webdav and from everywhere else via a web interface. There are also a couple of mobile apps in the works and it runs on a standard LAMP stack. http://owncloud.org/index.php/Main_Page And a blog post about the current status: http://owncloudtest.blogspot.com/2011/06/owncloud-20-just-merged-with.html