Re: [PLUG] Alternatives to Dropbox on Linux

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 8:14 PM Martin Cracauer via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> Walt Mankowski via plug wrote on Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 07:56:25PM -0400:
> >
> > Does anyone have any alternatives they can suggest? I don't need any bells and whistles. All I want is Dropbox's functionality from 15 years ago -- a single drive that quietly and automatically syncs files between Linux, macOS and Windows.
>
> Amazon s3 comes to mind.  It doesn't sync, but you can mount.
>

s3cmd has a sync function which you can use to sync a directory tree
with an s3 bucket.  I've never actually used it, but I imagine it
would work.  I do use s3cmd to store/retrieve files all the time.

However, that isn't really the intended design of s3.  I'm guessing
Dropbox uses a push/notify mechanism to update files in realtime.
With s3 you would probably have to poll for changes, and since s3
charges for all API calls you're going to pay based on the frequency
of polling.  As you'd expect API calls just to list
directories/metadata are inexpensive, but if you have a lot of data I
imagine it could still add up if you're polling frequently.  If you
don't poll frequently I imagine you could run into the issue of
conflict resolution.  Polling would also cause local IO, again since
it isn't running as a daemon with filesystem notifications.

You might consider it though if you just need an interim solution.

-- 
Rich
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