Roll Out Your Own Dropbox Alternative

Productivity Sauce

Dropbox is without doubt an extremely useful service, but it has two major drawbacks: it uses proprietary software and -- as with any cloud-based service -- you leave your data at the mercy of a third party. So why not roll out your own solution that replaces Dropbox and runs on your own server? If you like the idea, then the Fak3r blog provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up your own file synchronization server. The main ingredients in Fak3r's recipe are the OpenSSH server, rsync and lsyncd. If the latter sounds familiar to you, it's because it has been covered on the Productivity Sauce blog before. Rolling out a local synchronization server using Fak3r's instruction is surprisingly easy: set up OpenSSH, install rsync, compile and configure lsyncd, and your server is ready to go.