Dropbox… interesting

The other day, whilst parsing webpages in my usual manor, I stumbled across a nifty service called dropbox. So far, it seems to offer all the perks of rolling ones own solution but with better OS integration, and a network server. I’m planning on putting it to the test for replacing my existing rsync based system.

What dropbox is capable of, is not far off from what one can do using rdiff-backup and your own server. Main difference I reckon is tone meshes well with SSH and the other relies upon SSL. The way dropbox claims to integrate with the OS however, would more than make up in time lost to configuration.

My main gripe of course, is that dropbox does not yet offer their desktop application for FreeBSD :-(. Which effectively limits how much I can use it until suitable builds become available for testing.

rdiff-backup can solve the problem just as well for me, since my home server is about as reliable as the rock of Gibraltar; the only problem being the software involved. The lowest common denominator among versions of rdiff-backup available for my platforms, are not compatible enough, 8=). Which is why my computers rely on a custom set of scripts built around rsync: rs-mgr rs-pull, rs-push, rs-touch, and rs-vars.

If dropbox became suitably available under FreeBSD, my life would be a heck of a lot easier, and vectra’s roll could be reduced to backups rather than storage central.