Joel Spolsky may have railed about the impossibility of network transparency in file management, but my god, the guys at Dropbox may actually have done it.
I’ve been using Dropbox for the last week, and it’s been seamless. Just download their app, and use the newly created Dropbox folder on your work computer as if it were a normal folder. Go home, turn on your home computer, and WOT the Dropbox folder there is exactly the same. At someone’s place? No problem. Just grab your files from the web interface.
Michael Lopp explains in better detail why it’s so phenomenal.
Try it now while it’s free in Beta.
That pretty much sums up how I felt about it when I first tried it. I thought you’d like it.
I’ve been using it for a month or so now and I’m throwing more and more of my hard drive into DropBox. Except for very large files or sensitive stuff I don’t want on the web I see no reason not to be able to get my stuff just because I’m on a different computer.
By the way, according the the developers, the 2Gb free accounts will remain that way in perpetuity. If you need more space (50Gb) you can pay a monthly fee.
I too have been looking for the one cloud service that worked without me having to do anything other than set it up. They finally create it and my company’s filters block it (any cloud storage for that matter.)
for me it’s simpler to create local directory and mount remote sshfs filesystem on it:
sshfs mijam@remote.fs.com:/some/path ./local_directory
if you add to /etc/fstab this mounting point, it will automatic at boot mount remote filesystem directory on your local mountpoint.
look at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8904 for more info
of course if you want to using sshfs you must have open ssh port on remote (work) computer.
@mijam Quick question: have you actually tried Dropbox? I use sshfs via MacFUSE and they are not even in the same ballpark. There is no way sshfs is simpler than DropBox,
Don’t get me wrong, sshfs is good for what it does (setting aside dropped connections, sluggish performance and half-transferred files for now) but doesn’t offer the same things as DropBox. In particular, sshfs can help set up a remote drive but it won’t synchronise files on two separate machines for you. Also, unless you add a version control system into the mix, sshfs does not give you revision control like DropBox does.
Additionally, if that remote sshfs drive does down you are stuck without your file. If DropBox goes down I still have my files on all the machine I have synchronising with Dropbox.
They are very different solutions, in my opinion.
@mark, hotdamn hotrod, I was just about to say the same as you, but you got there faster and more succint. that’s probably your reddit karma is 3 times greater than mine.
