Open-source Dropbox alternative powered by Git

Some mention of hosting this on GitHub and BitBucket here. I can't imagine Git-As-A-Service providers would be thrilled with this kind of application, it will completely hammer their services compared to the occasional commits and pulls that occur with a code base.<p>It will probably update their conditions if they don't already preclude it. Or maybe they will embrace it with a premium pricing plan. I certainly wouldn't count on hosting this against BitBucket's free plan.

Ever try committing a 100meg file into git? 100% CPU for 10s of seconds. Game over.<p>Git is a great idea for this, but in practice it performs terribly.

Just curious - why are there so many Dropbox alternative posting lately? Is re-doing an already elegant solution really a top priority for people? I haven't looked at this post at all (so I'm not trying to make any judgement on it), I'm just curious as to why so many people are interested in making Dropbox alternatives lately.

Just want to add a quick comment about our goals for gitdocs. Obviously this was never intended to be a 'dropbox-killer', in fact at Miso we actually use both. Dropbox for videos, large binary files, business and legal files.<p>Instead we use gitdocs for storing our "docs": Task lists, wiki, planning, collaborative design, note taking, code snippets et al. And the gitdocs web front-end (<a href="http://imgur.com/eaTTY" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/eaTTY</a>) is optimized for that since it renders wiki pages (formatted markdown/textile), has full code syntax highlighting, file search, revision history and a rich text editor.

Dropbox wins on UX, which is where FOSS fails almost every time. A quick way to know whether such projects will fail: if they mention anything about the technologies used. Making it obvious to use and "just work" is what is needed.<p>Too bad that is actually the hard part.

For synchronization of your personal files, check out Unison.<p><a href="http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/</a>

Not really an alternative till it supports clients for all sorts of platforms and mobile devices IMHO

It's neat because it can be used on top of git without any additional effort but it'd be more interesting to see something that leverages git's server-side post-push hook to notify the other clients about changes. gitdocs, depending on the polling interval, either has an increased probability of causing merge conflicts or does a crazy amount of git pulls.

The real problem with this is that Git is awful at versioning binary / large files.

Related: <a href="http://sparkleshare.org/" rel="nofollow">http://sparkleshare.org/</a>

The readme suggests to use bitbucket.org which I didn't realise had <i>unlimited</i> storage, even on the free plan for up to 5 users?<p>So if the CPU issue can be resolved for committing large files, could it be used as a backup for your warez etc?

I think Lipsync - <a href="https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/philcryer/lipsync</a> - might be better, Git isn't great for lots of large binary files.

A comparable alternative is never going to free for everyone. Someone has to pay the Amazon fees for S3 use. Isn't it true that the few Dropbox users who do pay for it support all the ones who do not?

Hah, I've done something similar to this, except it uses SVN. Cross platform too! But you know what sucked? Performance. SVN is slooowwwww when it came to binary files.<p>You can check it out here.

This was posted here a few weeks ago, but at the time it was Mac-only. Now it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. I assume this is the reason for the re-post.

It reminds me again that Dropbox is hard to beat.

I had a same idea right after dropbox but I lost the thought about the clients for all popular OS.