[clug] SparkleShare vs. Dropbox

[Michael Ellerman]

On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 09:32 +1000, Bob Edwards wrote:
> I have been using SparkleShare recently (http://sparkleshare.org), which
> is a "Dropbox replacement" built on all the goodness of git and ssh etc.
> (and you can easily run your own server, so complete control over your
> files etc. - also runs on Macs, 'doze and Linux - but not Android, yet).
> 
> Anyway, being built on top of git, SparkleShare ends up using up to
> twice the disk space on each client as compared to just the files it
> is managing.
> 
> Eg. I have about 1.5GB of PDFs in a shared "folder" on my client and
> git adds another 1.4GB for its compressed, cryptographically hashed
> "repository" of those files. On the server, it only stores the 1.4GB
> of git stuff, but on each other client that is syncing with my share,
> there is the same git "overhead".

No one has mentioned git-annex, so I will. It started life more as a
tool on top of git, but is evolving into something that could replace
dropbox.

By default it uses symlinks into the .git/objects directory, so there's
almost no overhead.

There is also a "direct mode" that I haven't used, which stores things
as regular files. http://git-annex.branchable.com/direct_mode

cheers