[Discuss] drop box software

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Boy.. do I feel stupid. I had no idea drop box was basically a
repository on steroids. I thought drop box was a service where I could
upload a 20 gigabyte file and send a URL with a password to a friend so
that he could down load that 20G file, thus working around large file
limits in e-mail attachments. I run a subversion server on my home
system which suffices for me to deal with keeping key files in a network
accessible repository. Any time I hear the word cloud, I cringe... What
happened to "The Grid"?

So, let me refraise my question, is there any open source packages which
would allow me to upload a file to a web site (my web site) and have it
password protected and I could then e-mail the URL and password to my
friend. I can do this all by hand, with .htaccess files etc, but I would
prefer a nice web service to do it.

thanks, and sorry for the confusion on my side...

On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 10:09 -0400, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> > From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> > bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Adler
> > 
> > I'm getting a bit confused. I thought drop box was a service where one
> > could upload a file, give it a password of some sort, and then you sent
> > the password to someone else who could use it to grab the file.
> > typically needed for large files, (multi-gigabyte) which cannot be
> > e-mailed directly. After some time, the file gets deleted automatically.
> > Does this drop box like systems mentioned use repository in the back
> > end? I would assume it would just dump the file in some directory.
> 
> Hey - Weren't you the guy whose OP said you wanted to build your own
> dropbox?  But it sounds like you don't really know what dropbox does...  So
> ... What is it you're trying to do?
> 
> Here's a description of dropbox:
> 
> You have a directory on your computer.  It's automatically live synced to
> some space in the cloud, which means all your file usage happens on local
> disk, and everything's available both while you're online and offline.  So
> everything's fast and reliable, and you can use it while you're travelling.
> Whenever there is a network connection available, it silently performs a
> 2-way sync in the background.
> 
> This has a few nice side effects...  If you have more than one computer
> connected to the same account, it means those computers are always in sync
> with each other.  You edit some file at work, you go home, and you continue
> working.  You can throw away your USB drive.  It's faster and more reliable
> than using a network file share across a WAN.  There is no need to perform
> any manual operations such as "svn commit" and so on.  If your computer is
> destroyed, you just join your account again, and it's all restored.  So
> people tend to use it for backup purposes too...
> 
> You can share a folder with another user.  So people use it for
> collaboration.  You and your sales force are working on some documents.  You
> edit something, and they get it instantly...  And vice-versa.  You're both
> always up to date.
> 
> Since it's all in the cloud, it's trivial for the servers to generate a URL
> to access stuff.  But by default there isn't any such URL, you have to
> generate it intentionally.  So if you right-click a file in your computer,
> you go to Dropbox / Copy Public URL.  And then it will give you a URL you
> can email to someone else.  Hence eliminating large attachments in email.
> 
> It does versioning.  It's compatible with windows & mac & linux & android &
> iphone.  You probably will install the client for convenience, but you don't
> need to.  You can do all your stuff via web interface if you want.
> (Convenient when you're visiting somebody else's computer.)  
> 
> I think that's enough of a sales pitch for dropbox.   ;-)
> 
> There are various other competitors out there --- Box.net, sugarsync,
> spideroak, and a few others.  They all have some differentiators, but very
> similar to each other functionally.
> 
>