Dropbox

[joekiser]

What are you guys running in lieu of Dropbox? I have been off in Linux-land for a while, where I got hooked on Dropbox to automatically sync files across multiple systems/OSes. It's been an awesome alternative to emailing myself a bunch of files all the time, especially since it it seamless...just save the file and it's automatically updated on the other computers.

That being said, my dependency on Dropbox over the past couple of years has resulted in most of my work/school documents being stored on the Dropbox server. Because my FreeBSD laptop is the odd man out from several computers capable of running a native client, I'm wondering if there exists a method of staying in sync with the Dropbox server. What tricks do you use? Or is there a cross-platform alternative to the service Dropbox provides?

[BSDfan666]

I don't know much about dropbox, but it doesn't look very appealing.. I'd rather pay for a dedicated server running software I know works.

That said, there is one service I remember seeing mentioned on the OpenBSD ports mailing lists.

Tarsnap, apparently this was done by a FreeBSD developer.

Source is available for the client, but it is not open source, you can't modify it legally, and you can't even use it if you're a Canadian.

It's not free, costs money.

[joekiser]

I think I can get it working using sitecopy from ports/www. Will report back later.

[TerryP]

The only thing better than dropbox is ssh -X followed by running screen or tmux.

Trust me, I've tried. Or should I say, there's nothing better unless your network is a lot more bland than mine.

[joekiser]

Okay, here's a workaround:

Go to https://dav.dropdav.com This provides WebDAV access to Dropbox.
Sign up with your regular Dropbox username (username@email.com) and password.
Install www/cadaver from ports.

Cadaver is similar to ftp or whatever, except it works with webdav hosts. So you do 'open dav.dropdav.com' and authenticate using your Dropbox username/password combo. Then you can pull everything using mget or mput, just hit '?' to get a list of commands. This works for now.

If you need to change your DropDav account info, or delete your account from accessing Dropbox, go to https://dropdav.com/account.php.

There ought to be a way to use www/sitecopy from ports so that you can auto-synchronize like the Dropbox daemon. But when I run 'sitecopy --fetch Dropbox' I get:

sitecopy: Fetching site `Dropbox' (on dav.dropdav.com in /)
sitecopy: Failed to fetch file listing for site `Dropbox':
sitecopy: XML parse error at line 21: not well-formed (invalid token)

Anyway, using cadaver works at least well enough to manually fetch/update the Dropbox contents. Not having auto-sync is something I can deal with. It beats using the web-interface.