These things are a worthy effort (there have been several such posts recently) but there is no way it's equivalent to Dropbox. Dropbox is cross-platform and has web-based file access and many other benefits. Is Dropbox-like file storage destined to be one of those things (like anti-virus, for example) where there are some fairly good open-source implementations which are never quite as good as the commercial product(s)?
Does anyone know of a similar setup that allows client-side encryption as well, with some nodes (those in the cloud) acting only as dumb storage that never sees the encryption keys?<p>The only thing I'm aware of is drbd, which acts at the block level, so you can stack dm-crypt and any file system (including OCFS2) on top. As far as I know, drbd only supports 2 nodes, though, which kind of limits the appeal.<p>(I'm specifically <i>not</i> talking about tunneling a normal cluster file system via SSL, which only provides end-to-end encryption)
These articles that describe how to "build your own dropbox" all ignore the client. For me, the beauty of dropbox is the simple, straightforward client. Backing up on my own hardware/cloud might be interesting, but not if I have to monkey around with shell scripts in a CLI.<p>When someone reverse-engineers the dropbox protocol so I can use the official dropbox client on my own infrastructure THAT will be news.
For those interested in building cloud apps we at SpiderOak offer a 'Do it yourself' Storage API that is designed specifically towards backup, sync etc.<p>You can find more info @ <a href="https://spideroak.com/blog/20100928101634-spideroak-diy-a-space-efficient-keyvalue-store-for-arbitrarily-large-values-now-in-beta" rel="nofollow">https://spideroak.com/blog/20100928101634-spideroak-diy-a-sp...</a>