[Unison-hackers] How do people feel about DropBox?

[Ryan Newton]

* You have to run their closed-source daemon on each of your hosts.
* You store files on their servers and have to trust that they'll be safe
there.

Well, actually, as compared to cloud services like Google Docs, etc, I don't
think the second point is really a problem.
The great thing about synchronization tools like both unison and dropbox (as
opposed to AFS/NFS/etc) is that all your machines have a local copy.  So
it's fine if the company disappears tomorrow.
   Actually, I see the server side storage as an added bonus.  Pure
client-client synchronization with unison requires that one personally be
responsible for unisoning their content to geographically diverse locations
for safe archival.  A big burden.  For many years I have been continually
setting up such configurations (with friends and family) and having them
quickly rot.

But if you meant "safe" in the "not revealed to others" rather than "not
deleted" sense, you're absolutely right.  Though hopefully in the future
these cloud services will encrypt everything and not know what they're
storing....

-Ryan


On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Andrew Schulman <andrex at alumni.utexas.net>wrote:

> Without trying out the software, but just looking around their web site, I
> notice a couple of things right away:
>
> * You have to run their closed-source daemon on each of your hosts.
> * You store files on their servers and have to trust that they'll be safe
> there.
>  I'm not inclined to be paranoid, but I'm allergic to both of these
> requirements-- neither of which Unison suffers from.
>
> Andrew.
>
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