We’ve outlined a few things you can do when Dropbox goes down, but if you want to take a more extreme approach you can roll your own Dropbox-like syncing and backup service with some open-source software.
Tech hacking blog Fak3r outlines the process and what you’ll need:
- At least two machines, one to be the server and one to be the client
- Some open source software: OpenSSH, rsync and lsyncd
The process involves some work and command line know-how, but it’s all pretty straightforward. We think Dropbox is awesome, but if you want a DIY method you should definitely check out Fak3r’s instructions.
HOWTO build your own open source Dropbox clone [via One Thing Well]
fak3r
Saturday, October 23, 2010 at 3:01 AMThanks for the link – it’s very cool that so many are (still) interested in this project – and that’s what it has become; a project. I’ll be releasing code to setup a complete command-line Dropbox like implementation on Linux in about a week. Code will be open source, BSD licensed and hosted on github.com. I’m hoping it will spur others to work on cross platform front-ends to talk to it. So far the technology is there, I’m just using what others have built, it’s just a matter of hooking it all up! After all, why reinvent the wheel? (not that I could ;))
Thanks again for all the interest, comments and support! I’ll post full info about the releases on http://fak3r.com in a few days.
pi3ch
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 12:03 AMThis solution (using rsync or lipsync which is based on rsync) doesn work properly specially when you want to delete files from your sync directory. I had this problem for ages until I found a work around from that. I wrote about this solution in my blog: http://bit.ly/owndropbox