My Geekdom

Sparkleshare: Maybe An Open, Privately Hosted, Dropbox Alternative

Dropbox took the internet by storm with its free storage and ease of access. But Dropbox comes with a limited amount of data, a level of secureness that is hard-to-understand, and rather proprietary.

Sparkleshare is an open source alternative to Dropbox that hit my radar screen about 6 months ago. I played with it a bit back then but it didn't seem to be quite there. I think I was using an early-alpha, pre-release version so I this was to be expected.

I gave it another try earlier this week and seem to be pretty happy with it. Some of the things I like about it include:

1. I get to host it on my own server. This means the data is private. I own it. Nobody else has a copy of it. Etc…
2. I have been renting a Linux VPS from RoseHosting.com ($20/month) for many years so they provide me with a convenient, managed, and relatively secure place to host Sparkleshare.
3. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure sparkleshare on my Linux VPS. Not because I'm brilliant but because Linux doesn't suck and Sparkleshare requires no special server software. Just a few standard packages such as Git and a copy-and-paste of one command line. The client install (Mac OS X) was equally simple.
4. Being that it is FOSS, there is continual scrutiny of the source code to maintain quality and security.

The only real objection I have with it is that Dropbox allows symbolic links in the Dropbox folder so I don't need to have all of my files in one directory. I haven't yet gotten this to work on Sparkleshare. Either I just haven't figured it out, someone else will add it shortly, or, being it is FOSS, I'll add it if I get motivated enough (BTW: I'm voting for someone else implementing it).